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JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., Boston. 



MY STUDY WINDOWS 



BY 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, A. M., 

PROFESSOR OF BELLES-LETTRES IN HARVARD COLLEGE. 





Wk*, 


■fL^ND 


fco. (£ 


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BOSTON: 
JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Late Ticknor & Fields, and Fields, Osgood, & Co. 

1875. 









to, 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1871, 

BY JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 

in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 



Transfer from 
y ? S. So»d|er's Horn* Ufay 
Oct.28,1931 



University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 






PKEFATOKY NOTE. 



HV JTY former volume of Essays has been so kindly 
-*-*-■- received that I am emboldened to make an- 
other and more miscellaneous collection. The papers 
here gathered have been written at intervals during the 
last fifteen years, and I knew no way so effectual to rid 
my mind of them and make ready for a new departure, 
as this of shutting them between two covers where 
they can haunt me, at least, no more. I should have 
preferred a simpler title, but publishers nowadays are 
inexorable on this point, and I was too much occupied 
for happiness of choice. That which I have desperately 

snatched is meant to imply both the books within and 

• 
the world without, and perhaps may pass muster in the 

case of one who has always found his most fruitful 

j study in the open air. 



TO 

PROFESSOR F. J. CHILD. 

My dear CniLD, — 

You were good enough to like my Essay on Chaucer 
(about whom you know so much more than I) ; and I shall 
accordingly so far presume upon our long frienclsmp as to 
inscribe the volume containing it with your name. 
Always heartily yours, 

J. R. LOWELL. 

Cambridge, Christmas, 1870. 



CONTENTS. 



-♦- 



Page 

My Garden Acquaintance 1 

A Good Word for Winter 24 

On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners . . 54 

A Great Public Character 83 

Carlyle 115 

Abraham Lincoln 150 

The Life and Letters of James Gates Percival . 178 

Thoreau 193 

Swinburne's Tragedies . . . . . .210 

Chaucer 227 

Library of Old Authors 290 

Emerson, the Lecturer 375 

Pope .......... 385 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



,NE of the most delightful books in my father's 
library was White's Natural History of Selborne. 
For me it has rather gained in charm with years. I used 
to read it without knowing the secret of the pleasure I 
found in it, but as I grow older I begin to detect some of 
the simple expedients of this natural magic. Open the 
book where you will, it takes you out of doors. In our 
broiling July weather one can walk out with this genially 
garrulous Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead of 
fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping abreast of him 
as he ambles along on his hobby-horse, now pointing to a 
pretty view, now stopping to watch the motions of a bird 
or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the Honourable 
Daines Barrington or Mr. Pennant. In simplicity of 
taste and natural refinement he reminds one of Walton ; 
in tenderness toward what he woidd have called the brute 
creation, of Cowper. I do not know whether his descrip- 
tions of scenery are good or not, but they have made me 
familiar with his neighborhood. Since I first read him, 
I have walked over some of his favorite haunts, but I 
still see them through his eyes rather than by any recol- 
lection of actual and personal vision. The book has also 
the delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. Wnite seems 
never to have had any harder work to do than to study 
the habits of his feathered fellow-townsfolk, or to watch 
the ripening of his peaches on the wall. His volumes are 
the journal of Adam in Paradise, 

1 A 



2 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

" Annihilating all that 's made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

It is positive rest only to look into that garden of his. 
It is vastly better than to 

" See great Diocletian walk 
In the Salonian garden's noble shade," 

for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with them the 
noises of Rome, while here the world has no entrance. 
No rumor of the revolt of the American Colonies seems 
to have reached him. " The natural term of an hog's 
life " has more interest for him than that of an empire. 
Burgoyne may surrender and welcome ; of what conse- 
quence is that compared with the fact that we can explain 
the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their turning over 
" to scratch themselves with one claw " 1 All the couriers 
in Europe spurring rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. 
White's little Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house- 
martin a day earlier or later than last year is a piece of 
news worth sending express to all his correspondents. 

Another secret charm of this book is its inadvertent 
humor, so much the more delicious because unsuspected 
by the author. How pleasant is his innocent vanity in 
adding to the list of the British, and still more of the 
Selbornian, fauna ! I believe he would gladly have con- 
sented to be eaten by a tiger or a crocodile, if by that 
means the occasional presence within the parish limits of 
either of these anthropophagous brutes could have been 
established. He brags of no fine society, but is plainly a 
little elated by " having considerable acquaintance with 
a tame brown owl." Most of us have known our share 
of owls, but few can boast of intimacy with a feathered 
one. The great events of Mr. White's life, too, have that 
disproportionate importance which is always humorous. 
To think of his hands having actually been thought 
worthy (as neither Willoughby's nor Ray's were) to hold 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 3 

a stilted plover, the Charadrius himantopus, with no back 
toe, and therefore "liable, in speculation, to perpetual 
vacillations " ! I wonder, by the way, if metaphysicians 
have no hind toes. In 1770 he makes the acquaintance 
in Sussex of " an old family tortoise," which had then 
been domesticated for thirty years. It is clear that he 
fell in love with it at first sight. We have no means of 
tracing the growth of his passion; but in 1780 we find 
him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. " The rattle 
and hurry of the journey so perfectly roused it that, when 
I turned it out in a border, it walked twice down to the 
bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court Journal : 
" Yesterday morning H. R. H. the Princess Alice took an 
airing of half an hour on the terrace of Windsor Castle." 
This tortoise might have been a member of the Royal 
Society, if he could have condescended to so ignoble an 
ambition. It had but just been discovered that a surface 
inclined at a certain angle with the plane of the horizon 
took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise had alwa} r s 
known this (though he unostentatiously made no parade 
of it), and used accordingly to tilt himself up against the 
garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to have been more 
of a philosopher than even Mr. White himself, caring for 
nothing but to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, 
or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself alive before 
frost, — a four-footed Diogenes, who carried his tub on 
his back. 

There are moods in which this kind of history is infi- 
nitely refreshing. These creatures whom we affect to 
look down upon as the drudges of instinct are members 
of a commonwealth whose constitution rests on immov- 
able bases. Never any need of reconstruction there ! 
They never dream of settling it by vote that eight hours 
are equal to ten, or that one creature is as clever as an- 
other and no more. They do not use their poor wits in 



4 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

regulating God's clocks, nor think they cannot go astray 
so long as they carry their guide-board about with them, 
— a delusion we often practise upon ourselves with our 
high and mighty reason, that admirable finger-post which 
points every way and always right. It is good for us now 
and then to converse with a world like Mr. White's, where 
Man is the least important of animals. But one who, 
like me, has always lived in the country and always on 
the same spot, is drawn to his book by other occult sym- 
pathies. Do we not share his indignation at that stupid 
Martin who had graduated his thermometer no lower 
than 4° above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the coldest 
weather ever known the mercury basely absconded into 
the bulb, and left us to see the victory slip through our 
fingers just as they were closing upon it 1 No man, I 
suspect, ever lived long in the country without being 
bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to 
be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed 
up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his 
neighbors. With us descendants of the Puritans espe- 
cially, these weather-competitions supply the abnegated 
excitement of the race-course. Men learn to value ther- 
mometers of the true imaginative temperament, capable 
of prodigious elations and corresponding dejections. The 
other day (5th July) I marked 98° in the shade, my high- 
water mark, higher by one degree than I had ever seen 
it before. I happened to meet a neighbor ; as we mopped 
our brows at each other, he told me that he had just 
cleared 100°, and I went home a beaten man. I had not 
felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exaggeration of 
sunshine ; but now it oppressed me with the prosaic vul- 
garity of an oven. What had been poetic intensity be- 
came all at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might suspect 
his thermometer (as indeed I did, for we Harvard men 
are apt to think ill of any graduation but our own) ; but 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 5 

it was a poor consolation. The fact remained that his 
herald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look down on 
mine. I seem to glimpse something of this familiar 
weakness in Mr. White. He, too, has shared in these 
mercurial triumphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that 
he had a true country-gentleman's interest in the weather- 
cock ; that his first question on coming down of a morn- 
ing was, like Barabas's, 

" Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill? " 
It is an innocent and healthful employment of the 
mind, distracting one from too continual study of him- 
self, and leading him to dwell rather upon the indiges- 
tions of the elements than his own. " Did the wind 
back round, or go about with the sun 1 " is a rational 
question that bears not remotely on the making of hay 
and the prosperity of crops. I have little doubt that 
the regulated observation of the vane in many different 
places, and the interchange of results by telegraph, would 
put the weather, as it were, in our power, by betraying 
its ambushes before it is ready to give the assault. At 
first sight, nothing seems more drolly trivial than the 
lives of those whose single achievement is to record the 
wind and the temperature three times a day. Yet such 
men are doubtless sent into the world for this special 
end, and perhaps there is no kind of accurate observa- 
tion, whatever its object, that has not its final use and 
value for some one or other. It is even to be hoped 
that the speculations of our newspaper editors and their 
myriad correspondents upon the signs of the political at- 
mosphere may also fill their appointed place in a well-reg- 
ulated universe, if it be only that of supplying so many 
more jack-o'-lanterns to the future historian. Nay, the 
observations on finance of an M. C. whose sole knowledge 
of the subject has been derived from a lifelong success in 
getting a living out of the public without paying any 



6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

equivalent therefor, will perhaps be of interest hereafter 
to some explorer of our cloaca maxima, whenever it is 
cleansed. 

For many years I have been in the habit of noting 
down some of the leading events of my embowered soli- 
tude, such as the coming of certain birds and the like, — 
a kind of memoires pour servir, after the fashion of White, 
rather than properly digested natural history. I thought 
it not impossible that a few simple stories of my winged 
acquaintances* might be found entertaining by persons 
of kindred taste. 

There is a common notion that animals are better 
meteorologists than men, and I have little doubt that in 
immediate weather-wisdom they have the advantage of 
our sophisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor or 
shepherd would be their match), but I have seen nothing 
that leads me to believe their minds capable of erecting 
the horoscope of a whole season, and letting us know be- 
forehand whether the winter will be severe or the sum- 
mer rainless. I more than suspect that the clerk of the 
weather himself does not always know very long in ad- 
vance whether he is to draw an order for hot or cold, 
dry or moist, and the musquash is scarce likely to be 
wiser. I have noted but two days' difference in the 
coming of the song-sparrow between a very early and a 
very backward spring. This very year I saw the linnets 
at work thatching, just before a snow-storm which 
covered the ground several inches deep for a number of 
days. They struck work and left us for a while, no 
doubt in search of food. Birds frequently perish from 
sudden changes in our whimsical spring weather of 
which they had no foreboding. More than thirty years 
ago, a cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my window, 
was covered with humming-birds benumbed by a fall of 
mingled rain and snow, which probably killed many of 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 7 

them. It should seem that their coming was dated by 
the height of the sun, which betrays them into unthrifty 
matrimony ; 

" So nature pricketh hem in their corages " ; 
but their going is another matter. The chimney-swal- 
lows leave us early, for example, apparently so soon as 
their latest fledglings are firm enough of wing to at- 
tempt the long rowing-match that is before them. On 
the other hand, the wild-geese probably do not leave the 
North till they are frozen out, for I have heard their 
bugles sounding southward so late as the middle of 
December. What may be called local migrations are 
doubtless dictated by the chances of food. I have once 
been visited by large flights of cross-bills ; and whenever 
the snow lies long and deep on the ground, a flock of 
cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the berries on my 
hawthorns. I have never been quite able to fathom the 
local, or rather geographical partialities of birds. Never 
before this summer (1870) have the king-birds, hand- 
somest of flycatchers, built in my orchard ; though I 
always know where to find them within half a mile. 
The rose-breasted grosbeak has been a familiar bird in 
Brookline (three miles away), yet I never saw one here 
till last July, when I found a female busy among my 
raspberries and surprisingly bold. I hope she was pros- 
pecting with a view to settlement in our garden. She 
seemed, on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and I 
would gladly plant another bed if it would help to win 
over so delightful a neighbor. 

The return of the robin is commonly announced by 
the newspapers, like that of eminent or notorious people 
to a watering-place, as the first authentic notification of 
spring. And such his appearance in the orchard and 
garden undoubtedly is. But, in spite of his name of 
migratory thrush, he stays with us all winter, and I 



8 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

have seen him when the thermometer marked 15 de- 
grees below zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably with- 
in, like Emerson's Titmouse, and as cheerful as he. The 
robin has a bad reputation among people who do not 
value themselves less for being fond of cherries. There is, 
I admit, a spice of vulgarity in him, and his song is rather 
of the Bloomfield sort, too largely ballasted with prose. 
His ethics are of the Poor Richard school, and the main 
chance which calls forth all his energy is altogether of 
the belly. He never has those fine intervals of lunacy 
into which his cousins, the catbird and the mavis, are 
apt to fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's a' 
that, I would not exchange him for all the cherries that 
ever came out of Asia Minor. With whatever faults, he 
has not wholly forfeited that superiority which belongs 
to the children of nature. He has a finer taste in fruit 
than could be distilled from many successive committees 
of the Horticultural Society, and he eats with a relishing 
gulp not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and freely 
exercises his right of eminent domain. His is the earli- 
est mess of green peas ; his all the mulberries I had 
fancied mine. But if he get also the lion's share of the 
raspberries, he is a great planter, and sows those wild ones 
in the woods, that solace the pedestrian and give a mo- 
mentary calm even to the jaded victims of the White 
Hills. He keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and knows 
to a shade of purple when your grapes have cooked long 
enough in the sun. During the severe drought a few 
years ago, the robins wholly vanished from my garden. 
I neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. Mean- 
while a small foreign grape-vine, rather shy of bearing, 
seemed to find the dusty air congenial, and, dreaming 
perhaps of its sweet Argos across the sea, decked itself 
with a score or so of fair bunches. I watched them 
from day to day till they should have secreted sugar 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 9 

enough from the sunbeams, and at last made up my 
mind that I would celebrate my vintage the next morn- 
ing. But the robins too had somehow kept note of 
them. They must have sent out spies, as did the Jew r s 
into the promised land, before I was stirring. When I 
went w T ith my basket, at least a dozen of these winged 
vintagers bustled out from among the leaves, and alight- 
ing on the nearest trees interchanged some shrill re- 
marks about me of a derogatory nature. They had fairly 
sacked the vine. Not Wellington's veterans made 
cleaner w r ork of a Spanish town ; not Federals or Con- 
federates were ever more impartial in the confiscation of 
neutral chickens. I was keeping my grapes a secret to 
surprise the fair Fidele with, but the robins made them 
a profounder secret to her than I had meant. The tat- 
tered remnant of a single bunch was all my harvest- 
home. How paltry it looked at the bottom of my 
basket, — as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an 
eagle's nest ! I could not help laughing ; and the robins 
seemed to join heartily in the merriment. There was a 
native grape-vine close by, blue with its less refined 
abundance, but my cunning thieves preferred the foreign 
flavor. Could I tax them with want of taste 1 

The robins are not good solo singers, but their chorus, 
as, like primitive fire- worshippers, they hail the return 
of light and warmth to the w T orld, is unrivalled. There 
are a hundred singing like one. They are noisy enough 
then, and sing, as poets should, with no afterthought. 
But w^hen they come after cherries to the tree near my 
window, they muffle their voices, and their faint pip, 
pip, pop ! sounds far aw T ay at the bottom of the gar- 
den, where they know 1 shall not suspect them of rob- 
bing the great black- walnut of its bitter-rinded store.* 

* The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill name, is one of the 
sweetest sounds in nature, softens his voice in the same way with the 
most beguiling mockery of distance. 



10 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

They are feathered Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how 
brightly their breasts, that look rather shabby in the 
sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the dark green of 
the fringe-tree ! After they have pinched and shaken 
all the life out of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound 
all the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped him, they 
stand up in honest self-confidence, expand their red 
waistcoats with the virtuous air of a lobby member, and 
outface you with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. 
" Do / look like a bird that knows the flavor of raw 
vermin 1 I throw myself upon a jury of my peers. 
Ask any robin if he ever ate anything less ascetic than 
the frugal berry of the juniper, and he will answer that 
his vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom cover 
such depravity 1 Alas, yes ! I have no doubt his breast 
was redder at that very moment with the blood of my 
raspberries. On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the 
garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds of berries, 
and is not averse from early pears. But when we re- 
member how omnivorous he is, eating his own weight in 
an incredibly short time, and that Nature seems exhaust- 
less in her invention of new insects hostile to vegetation, 
perhaps we may reckon that he does more good than 
harm. For my own part, I would rather have his cheer- 
fulness and kind neighborhood than many berries. 

For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still warmer re- 
gard. Always a good singer, he sometimes nearly equals 
the brown thrush, and has the merit of keeping up his 
music later in the evening than any bird of my familiar 
acquaintance. Ever since I can remember, a pair of 
them have built in a gigantic syringa, near our front 
door, and I have known the male to sing almost unin- 
terruptedly during the evenings of early summer till 
twilight duskened into dark. They differ greatly in 
vocal talent, but all have a delightful way of crooning 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 11 

over, and, as it were, rehearsing their soiig in an under- 
tone, which makes their nearness always unobtrusive. 
Though there is the most trustworthy witness to the 
imitative propensity of this bird, I have only once, 
during an intimacy of more than forty years, heard him 
indulge it. In that case, the imitation was by no means 
so close as to deceive, but a free reproduction of the 
notes of some other birds, especially of the oriole, as a 
kind of variation in his own song. The catbird is as 
shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only when his 
nest or his fledglings are approached does he become 
noisy and almost aggressive. I have known him to 
station his young in a thick cornel-bush on the edge of 
the raspberry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and 
feed them there for a week or more. In such cases he 
shows none of that conscious guilt which makes the 
robin contemptible. On the contrary, he will maintain 
his post in the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder 
who ventures to steal his berries. After all, his claim is 
only for tithes, while the robin will bag your entire crop 
if he get a chance. 

Dr. Watts's statement that " birds in their little nests 
agree," like too many others intended to form the infant 
mind, is very far from being true. On the contrary, the 
most peaceful relation of the different species to each 
other is that of armed neutrality. They are very jealous 
of neighbors. A few years ago, I was much interested 
in the housebuilding of a pair of summer yellow-birds. 
They had chosen a very pretty site near the top of a tall 
white lilac, within easy eye-shot of a chamber window. 
A very pleasant thing it was to see their little home 
growing with mutual help, to watch their industrious 
skill interrupted only by little flirts and snatches of 
endearment, frugally cut short by the common-sense 
of the tiny housewife. They had brought their work 



12 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

nearly to an end, and had already begun to line it with 
fern-down, the gathering of which demanded more dis- 
tant journeys and longer absences. But, alas ! the 
syringa, immemorial manor of the catbirds, was not 
more than twenty feet away, and these " giddy neigh- 
bors " had, as it appeared, been all along jealously watch- 
ful, though silent, witnesses of what they deemed an 
intrusion of squatters. No sooner were the pretty 
mates fairly gone for a new load of lining, than 

" To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots 
Came stealing." 

Silently they flew back and forth, each giving a vengeful 
dab at the nest in passing. They did not fall-to and 
deliberately destroy it, for they might have been caught 
at their mischief. As it was, whenever the yellow- 
birds came back, their enemies were hidden in their own 
sight-proof bush. Several times their unconscious vic- 
tims repaired damages, but at length, after counsel taken 
together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like other unlet- 
tered folk, they came to the conclusion that the Devil 
was in it, and yielded to the invisible persecutions of 
witchcraft. 

The robins, by constant attacks and annoyances, have 
succeeded in driving off the blue-jays who used to build 
in our pines, their gay colors and quaint noisy ways 
making them welcome and amusing neighbors. I once 
had the chance of doing a kindness to a household of 
them, which they received with very friendly condescen- 
sion. I had had my eye for some time upon a nest, and 
was puzzled by a constant fluttering of what seemed 
full-grown wings in it whenever I drew nigh. At last I 
climbed the tree, in spite of angry protests from the 
old birds against my intrusion. The mystery had a 
very simple solution. In building the nest, a long piece 
of packthread had been somewhat loosely woven in. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13 

Three of the young had contrived to entangle them- 
selves in it, and had become full-grown without being 
able to launch themselves upon the air. One was un- 
harmed ; another had so tightly twisted the cord about 
its shank that one foot was curled up and seemed para- 
lyzed ; the third, in its struggles to escape, had sawn 
through the flesh of the thigh and so much harmed 
itself that I thought it humane to put an end to its 
misery. When I took out my knife to cut their hempen 
bonds, the heads of the family seemed to divine my 
friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their cries and 
threats, they perched quietly within reach of my hand, 
and watched me in my work of manumission. This, 
owing to the fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an 
affair of some delicacy ; but erelong I was rewarded by 
seeing one of them fly away to a neighboring tree, while 
the cripple, making a parachute of his wings, came light- 
ly to the ground, and hopped off as well as he could with 
one leg, obsequiously waited on by his elders. A week 
later I had the satisfaction of meeting him in the pine- 
walk, in good spirits, and already so far recovered as to 
be able to balance himself with the lame foot. I have 
no doubt that in his old age he accounted for his lame- 
ness by some handsome story of a wound received at 
the famous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, over- 
come by numbers, was driven from its ancient camping- 
ground. Of late years the jays have visited us only at 
intervals; and in winter their bright plumage, set off 
by the snow, and their cheerful cry, are especially wel- 
come. They would have furnished JSsop with a fable, 
for the feathered crest in which they seem to take so 
much satisfaction is often their fatal snare. Country 
boys make a hole with their finger in the snow-crust 
just large enough to admit the jay's head, and, hollow- 
ing it out somewhat beneath, bait it with a few kernels 



14 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

of corn. The crest slips easily into the trap, but refuses 
to be pulled out again, and he who came to feast remains 
a prey. 

Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted a settle- 
ment in my pines, and twice have the robins, who claim 
a right of pre-emption, so successfully played the part 
of border-ruffians as to drive them away, — to my great 
regret, for they are the best substitute we have for 
rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas ! empty of its so long- 
loved household) they build by hundreds, and nothing 
can be more cheery than their creaking clatter (like a 
convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as they gather 
at evening to debate in mass meeting their windy poli- 
tics, or to gossip at their tent-doors over the events of 
the day. Their port is grave, and their stalk across the 
turf as martial as that of a second-rate ghost in Hamlet. 
They never meddled with my corn, so far as I could 
discover. 

For a few years I had crows, but their nests are an 
irresistible bait for boys, and their settlement was broken 
up. They grew so wonted as to throw off a great part 
of their shyness, and to tolerate my near approach. 
One very hot day I stood for some time within twenty 
feet of a mother and three children, who sat on an elm 
bough over my head, gasping in the sultry air, and 
holding their wings half-spread for coolness. All birds 
during the pairing season become more or less sentimen- 
tal, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the 
grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual 
song. The crow is very comical as a lover, and to hear 
him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint Preux 
standard, has something the effect of a Mississippi boat- 
man quoting Tennyson. Yet there are few things to my 
ear more melodious than his caw of a clear winter morn- 
ing as it drops to you filtered through five hundred 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 

fathoms of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller 
birds makes the moral character of the crow, for all his 
deaconlike demeanor and garb, somewhat questionable. 
He could never sally forth without insult. The golden 
robins, especially, would chase him as far as I could fol- 
low with my eye, making him duck clumsily to avoid 
their importunate bills. I do not believe, however, that 
he robbed any nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the 
gas-works, which, in our free-and-easy community, is 
allowed to poison the river, supplied him with dead 
alewives in abundance. I used to watch him making 
his periodical visits to the salt-marshes and coming back 
with a fish in his beak to his young savages, who, no 
doubt, like it in that condition which makes it savory to 
the Kanakas and other corvine races of men. 

Orioles are in great plenty with me. I have seen 
seven males flashing about the garden at once. A 
merry crew of them swing their hammocks from the 
pendulous boughs. During one of these latter years, 
when the canker-worms stripped our elms as bare as 
winter, these birds went to the trouble of rebuilding 
their unroofed nests, and chose for the purpose trees 
which are safe from those swarming vandals, such as the 
ash and the button-wood. One year a pair (disturbed, 
I suppose, elsewhere) built a second nest in an elm, 
within a few yards of the house. My friend, Edward E. 
Hale, told me once that the oriole rejected from his web 
all strands of brilliant color, and I thought it a striking 
example of that instinct of concealment noticeable in 
many birds, though it should seem in this instance that 
the nest was amply protected by its position from all 
marauders but owls and squirrels. Last year, however, 
I had the fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. 
A pair of orioles built on the lowest trailer of a weeping 
elm, which hung within ten feet of our drawing-room 



16 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

window, and so low that I could reach it from the 
ground. The nest was wholly woven and felted with 
ravellings of woollen carpet in which scarlet predomi- 
nated. Would the same thing have happened in the 
woods ] Or did the nearness of a human dwelling 
perhaps give the birds a greater feeling of security] 
They are very bold, by the way, in quest of cordage, 
and I have often watched them stripping the fibrous 
bark from a honeysuckle growing over the very door. 
But, indeed, all my birds look upon me as if I were a 
liere tenant at will, and they were landlords. With 
shame I confess it, I have been bullied even by a hum- 
ming-bird. This spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree 
of its lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs came 
purring toward me, couching his long bill like a lance, 
his throat sparkling with angry fire, to warn me oft* from 
a Missouri-currant whose honey he was sipping. And 
many a time he has driven me out of a flower-bed. 
This summer, by the way, a pair of these winged 
emeralds fastened their mossy acorn-cup upon a bough 
of the same elm which the orioles had enlivened the 
year before. We watched all their proceedings from the 
window through an opera-glass, and saw their two nest- 
lings grow from black needles with a tuft of down at the 
lower end, till they whirled away on their first short 
experimental flights. They became strong of wing in a 
surprisingly short time, and I never saw them or the 
male bird after, though the female was regular as usual 
in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. I do not 
think it ground enough for a generalization, but in the 
many times when I watched the old birds feeding their 
young, the mother aiwa3 T s alighted, while the father as 
uniformly remained upon the wing. 

The bobolinks are generally chance visitors, tinkling 
through the garden in blossoming-time, but this year ; 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 17 

owing to the long rains early in the season, their favorite 
meadows were flooded, and they were driven to the up- 
land. So I had a pair of them domiciled in my grass- 
field. The male used to perch in an apple-tree, then in 
full bloom, and, while I stood perfectly still close by, he 
would circle away, quivering round the entire field of 
five acres, with no break in his song, and settle clown 
again among the blossoms, to be hurried away almost 
immediately by a new rapture of music. He had the 
volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, and, like him, 
appeared to be proclaiming the merits of some quack 
remedy. Opodeldoc-opodeldoc-try-Doctor-Liiicobis-opodel- 
doc ! he seemed to repeat over and over again, with a 
rapidity that would have distanced the deftest-tongued 
Figaro that ever rattled. I remember Count Gurowski 
saying once, with that easy superiority of knowledge 
about this country which is the monopoly of foreigners, 
that we had no singing-birds ! Well, well, Mr. Hepworth 
Dixon has found the typical America in Oneida and 
Salt Lake City. Of course, an intelligent European is 
the best judge of these matters. The truth is there are 
more singing-birds in Europe because there are fewer 
forests. These songsters love the neighborhood of man 
because hawks and owls are rarer, while their own food 
is more abundant. Most people seem to think, the more 
trees, the more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who first 
tried the primitive-forest-cure, and whose description of 
the wilderness in its imaginative effects is unmatched, 
fancies the " people of the air singing their hymns to 
him." So far as my own observation goes, the farther 
one penetrates the sombre solitudes of the woods, the 
more seldom does he hear the voice of any singing-bird. 
In spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness of detail, in spite 
of that marvellous reverberation of the decrepit tree 
falling of its own weight, which he was the first to 

B 



18 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

notice, I cannot help doubting whether he made his way 
very deep into the wilderness. At any rate, in a letter 
to Fontanes, written in 1804, he speaks of ones chevaux 
paissant a quelque distance. To be sure Chateaubriand 
w r as apt to mount the high horse, and this may have 
been but an afterthought of the grand seigneur, but 
certainly one would not make much headway on horse- 
back toward the druid fastnesses of the primaeval pine. 

The bobolinks build in considerable numbers in a 
meadow within a quarter of a mile of us. A houseless 
lane passes through the midst of their camp, and in 
clear westerly weather, at the right season, one may 
hear a score of them singing at once. When they are 
breeding, if I chance to pass, one of the male birds 
always accompanies me like a constable, flitting from 
post to post of the rail-fence, with a short note of re- 
proof continually repeated, till I am fairly out of the 
neighborhood. Then he will swing away into the air 
and run down the w T ind, gurgling music without stint 
over the unheeding tussocks of meadow-grass and dark 
clumps of bulrushes that mark his domain. 

We have no bird whose song will match the nightin- 
gale's in compass, none whose note is so rich as that 
of the European blackbird ; but for mere rapture I 
have never heard the bobolink's rival. But his opera- 
season is a short one. The ground and tree sparrows 
are our most constant performers. It is now late in 
August, and one of the latter sings every day and all 
day long in the garden. Till within a fortnight, a pair 
of indigo-birds would keep up their lively duo for an 
hour together. While I write, I hear an oriole gay as 
in June, and the plaintive may-be of the goldfinch tells 
me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know not what 
the experience of others may have been, but the only 
bird I have ever heard sing in the night has been the 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 19 

chip-bird. I should say he sang about as often during 
the darkness as cocks crow. One can hardly help fancy- 
ing that he sings in his dreams. 

" Father of light, what sunnie seed, 
What glance of day hast thou confined 
Into this bird? To all the breed 
This busie ray thou hast assigned; 
Their magnetism works all night, 
And dreams of Paradise and light." 

On second thought, I remember to have heard the cuckoo 
strike the hours nearly all night with the regularity of a 
Swiss clock. 

The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare to that 
end, bring us the flicker every summer, and almost 
daily I hear his wild scream and laugh close at hand, 
himself invisible. He is a shy bird, but a few days ago 
I had the satisfaction of studying him through the 
blinds as he sat on a tree within a few feet of me. 
Seen so near and at rest, he makes good his claim to the 
title of pigeon-woodpecker. Lumberers have a notion 
that he is harmful to timber, digging little holes through 
the bark to encourage the settlement of insects. The 
regular rings of such perforations which one may see in 
almost any apple-orchard seem to give some probability 
to this theory. Almost every season a solitary quail 
visits us, and, unseen among the currant-bushes, calls 
Bob White, Bob White, as if he were playing at hide-and- 
seek with that imaginary being. A rarer visitant is the 
turtle-dove, whose pleasant coo (something like the 
muffled crow of a cock from a coop covered with snow) I 
have sometimes heard, and whom I once had the good 
luck to see close by me in the mulberry-tree. The wild- 
pigeon, once numerous, I have not seen for many years.* 
Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then quarters him- 
self upon us for a few days, sitting sluggish in a tree 

* They made their appearance again this summer (1870). 



20 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

after a surfeit of poultry. One of them once offered me 
a near shot from my study-window one drizzly day for 
several hours. But it was Sunday, and I gave him the 
benefit of its gracious truce of God. 

Certain birds have disappeared from our neighborhood 
within my memory. I remember when the whippoorwill 
could be heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, once 
common, is now rare. The brown thrush has moved far- 
ther up country. For years I have not seen or heard 
any of the larger owls, whose hooting was one of my boy- 
ish terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange emigrant, that 
eastward takes his way, has come and gone again in my 
time. The bank-swallows, wellnigh innumerable during 
my boyhood, no longer frequent the crumbly cliff of the 
gravel-pit by the river. The barn-swallows, which once 
swarmed in our barn, flashing through the dusty sun- 
streaks of the mow, have been gone these many years. 
My father would lead me out to see them gather on the 
roof, and take counsel before their yearly migration, as 
Mr. White used to see them at Selborne. Eheu, fugaces ! 
Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, and rolls his 
distant thunders night and day in the wide-throated chim- 
neys, still sprinkles the evening air with his merry twit- 
tering. The populous heronry in Fresh Pond meadows 
has been wellnigh broken up, but still a pair or two 
haunt the old home, as the gypsies of Ellangowan their 
ruined huts, and every evening fly over us riverwards, 
clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk as they go, and, 
in cloudy weather, scarce higher than the tops of the 
chimneys. Sometimes I have known one to alight in 
one of our trees, though for what purpose I never could 
divine. Kingfishers have sometimes puzzled me in the 
same way, perched at high noon in a pine, springing their 
watchman's rattle when they flitted away from my curi- 
osity, and seeming to shove their top-heavy heads along 
as a man does a wheelbarrow. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 21 

Some birds have left us, I suppose, because the country 
is growing less wild. I once found a summer duck's nest 
within quarter of a mile of our house, but such a trou- 
vaille would be impossible now as Kidd's treasure. And 
yet the mere taming of the neighborhood does not quite 
satisfy me as an explanation. Twenty years ago, on my 
way to bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace of 
woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring within a few rods 
of a house, and constantly visited by thirsty cows. There 
was no growth of any kind to conceal them, and yet these 
ordinarily shy birds were almost as indifferent to my 
passing as common poultry would have been. Since 
bird-nesting has become scientific, and dignified itself as 
oology, that, no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our 
losses. But some old friends are constant. Wilson's 
thrush comes every year to remind me of that most poetic 
of ornithologists. He flits before me through the pine- 
walk like the very genius of solitude. A pair of pewees 
have built immemorially on a jutting brick in the arched 
entrance to the ice-house. Always on the same brick, 
and never more than a single pair, though two broods of 
five each are raised there every summer. How do they 
settle their claim to the homestead 1 By what right of 
primogeniture 1 Once the children of a man employed 
about the place oblogized the nest, and the pewees left us 
for a year or two. I felt towards those boys as the mess- 
mates of the Ancient Mariner did towards him after he 
had shot the albatross. But the pewees came back at 
last, and one of them is now on his wonted perch, so near 
my window that I can hear the click of his bill as he 
snaps a fly on the wing with the unerring precision a 
stately Trasteverina shows in the capture of her smaller 
deer. The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the morn- 
ing ; and, during the early summer he preludes his 
matutinal ejaculation of pewee with a slender whistle, 



22 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

unheard at any other time. He saddens with the sea- 
son, and, as summer declines, he changes his note to eheu, 
pewee ! as if in lamentation. Had he been an Italian bird, 
Ovid would have had a plaintive tale to tell about him. 
He is so familiar as often to pursue a fly through the 
open window into my library. 

There is something inexpressibly dear to me in these 
old friendships of a lifetime. There is scarce a tree of 
mine but has had, at some time or other, a happy home- 
stead among its boughs, to which I cannot say, 
" Many light hearts and wings, 
Which now be dead, lodged in thy living bowers." 

My walk under the pines would lose half its summer 
charm were I to miss that shy anchorite, the Wilson's 
thrush, nor hear in haying-time the metallic ring of 
his song, that justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet. 
I protect my game as jealously as an English squire. 
If anybody had oologized a certain cuckoo's nest I 
know of (I have a pair in my garden every year), 
it would have left me a sore place in my mind for 
weeks. I love to bring these aborigines back to the man- 
suetude they showed to the early voyagers, and before 
(forgive the involuntary pun) they had grown accustomed 
to man and knew his savage ways. And they repay your 
kindness with a sweet familiarity too delicate ever to 
breed contempt. I have made a Penn-treaty with them, 
preferring that to the Puritan way with the natives, 
which converted them to a little Hebraism and a great 
deal of Medford rum. If they will not come near enough 
to me (as most of them will), I bring them close with an 
opera-glass, — a much better weapon than a gun. I 
would not, if I could, convert them from their pretty 
pagan ways. The only one I sometimes have savage 
doubts about is the red squirrel. I think he oologizes. 
I know he eats cherries (we counted five of them at one 



MY GAKDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 23 

time in a single tree, the stones pattering down like the 
sparse hail that preludes a storm), and that he gnaws off 
the small end of pears to get at the seeds. He steals 
the corn from under the noses of my poultry. But what 
would you have % He will come down upon the limb of 
the tree I am lying under till he is within a yard of me. 
He and his mate will scurry up and down the great black- 
walnut for my diversion, chattering like monkeys. Can 
I sign his death-warrant w T ho has tolerated me about his 
grounds so long % Not I. Let them steal, and welcome. 
I am sure I should, had I had the same bringing up and 
the same temptation. As for the birds, I do not believe 
there is one of them but does more good than harm ; and 
of how many featherless bipeds can this be said 1 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 



""IV /TEN scarcely know how beautiful fire is," says 
JLV_1_ Shelley ; and I am apt to think there are a 
good many other things concerning which their knowl- 
edge might be largely increased without becoming burden- 
some. Nor are they altogether reluctant to be taught, 
— not so reluctant, perhaps, as unable, — and education 
is sure to find one fulcrum ready to her hand by which 
to get a purchase on them. For most of us, I have no- 
ticed, are not without an amiable willingness to assist at 
any spectacle or entertainment (loosely so called) for 
which no fee is charged at the door. If special tickets 
are sent us, another element of pleasure is added in a 
sense of privilege and pre-eminence (pitiably scarce in 
a democracy) so deeply rooted in human nature that I 
have seen people take a strange satisfaction in being 
near of kin to the mute chief personage in a funeral. It 
gave them a moment's advantage over the rest of us 
whose grief was rated at a lower place in the procession. 
But the words " admission free " at the bottom of a hand- 
bill, though holding out no bait of inequality, have yet 
a singular charm for many minds, especially in the coun- 
try. There is something touching in the constancy with 
which men attend free lectures, and in the honest 
patience with which they listen to them. He who pa} r s 
may yawn or shift testily in his seat, or even go out with 
an awful reverberation of criticism, for he has bought the 
right to do any or all of these and paid for it. But gra- 



A GOOD WORD FOE WINTER. 25 

tuitous hearers are anaesthetized to suffering by a sense 
of virtue. They are performing perhaps the noblest, as 
it is one of the most difficult, of human functions in get- 
ting Something (no matter how small) for Nothing. 
They are not pestered by the awful duty of securing 
their money's worth. They are wasting time, to do 
which elegantly and without lassitude is the highest 
achievement of civilization. If they are cheated, it is, at 
worst, only of a superfluous hour which was rotting on 
their hands. Not only is mere amusement made more 
piquant, but instruction more -palatable, by this univer- 
sally relished sauce of gratuity. And if the philosophic 
observer finds an object of agreeable contemplation in 
the audience, as they listen to a discourse on the proba- 
bility of making missionaries go down better with the 
Feejee-lslanders by balancing the hymn-book in one 
pocket with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, or 
to a plea for arming the female gorilla with the ballot, 
he also takes a friendly interest in the lecturer, and ad- 
mires the wise economy of Nature who thus contrives 
an ample field of honest labor for her bores. Even 
when the insidious hat is passed round after one of these 
eleemosynary feasts, the relish is but heightened by a 
conscientious refusal to disturb the satisfaction's com- 
pleteness with the rattle of a single contributory penny. 
So firmly persuaded am I of this (/ra^'s-instinct in our 
common humanity, that I believe I could fill a house by 
advertising a free lecture on Tupper considered as a 
philosophic poet, or on my personal recollections of the 
late James K. Polk. This being so, I have sometimes 
wondered that the peep-shows which Nature provides 
with such endless variety for her children, and to which 
we are admitted on the bare condition of having eyes, 
should be so generally neglected. To be sure, eyes 
are not so common as people think, or poets would be 

2 



26 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

plentier, and perhaps also these exhibitions of hers are 
cheapened in estimation by the fact that in enjoying 
them we are not getting the better of anybody else. 
Your true lovers of nature, however, contrive to get 
even this solace ; and Wordsworth looking upon moun- 
tains as his own peculiar sweethearts, was jealou's of 
anybody else who ventured upon even the most innocent 
flirtation with them. As if such fellows, indeed, could 
pretend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it which was 
so remarkable in him ! Marry come up ! Mountains, no 
doubt, may inspire a profounder and more exclusive pas- 
sion, but on the w T hole I am not sorry to have been born 
and bred among more domestic scenes, where I can be 
hospitable without a pang. I am going to ask you pres- 
ently to take potluck with me at a board where Winter 
shall supply whatever there is of cheer. 

I think the old fellow has hitherto had scant justice 
done him in the main. We make him the symbol of old 
age or death, and think we have settled the matter. As 
if old age were never kindly as well as frosty ; as if it 
had no reverend graces of its own as good in their way as 
the noisy impertinence of childhood, the elbowing self- 
conceit of youth, or the pompous mediocrity of middle 
life ! As if there were anything discreditable in death, 
or nobody had ever longed for it ! Suppose we grant 
that Winter is the sleep of the year, what then 1 I take 
it upon me to say that his dreams are finer than the 
best reality of his waking rivals. 

' : Sleep, Silence' child, the father of soft Rest," 

is a ver} T agreeable acquaintance, and most of us are bet- 
ter employed in his company than anywhere else. For 
my own part, I think Winter a pretty wide-awake old 
boy, and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are more 
congenial to my mood, and more wholesome for me, 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 27 

than any charms of which his rivals are capable. 
Spring is a fickle mistress, who either does not know her 
own mind, or is so long in making it up, whether you 
shall have her or not have her, that one gets tired at 
last of her pretty miffs and reconciliations. You go to 
her to be cheered up a bit, and ten to one catch her in 
the sulks, expecting you to find enough good-humor for 
both. After she has become Mrs. Summer she grows a 
little more staid in her demeanor ; and her abundant 
table, where you are sure to get the earliest fruits and 
vegetables of the season, is a good foundation for steady 
friendship ; but she has lost that delicious aroma of 
maidenhood, and what was delicately rounded grace in 
the girl gives more than hints of something like redun- 
dance in the matron. Autumn is the poet of the family. 
He gets you up a splendor that you would say was 
made out of real sunset ; but it is nothing more than a 
few hectic leaves, when all is done. He is but a senti- 
mentalist, after all ; a kind of Lamartine whining along 
the ancestral avenues he has made bare timber of, and 
begging a contribution of good-spirits from your own 
savings to keep him in countenance. But Winter has 
his delicate sensibilities too, only he does not make them 
as good as indelicate by thrusting them forever in } 7 our 
face. He is a better poet than Autumn, w T hen he has a 
mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, he brings you 
down to your bare manhood, and bids you understand 
him out of that, with no adventitious helps of associa- 
tion, or he will none of you. He does not touch those 
melancholy chords on which Autumn is as great a 
master as Heine. Well, is there no such thing as 
thrumming on them and maundering over them till 
they get out of tune, and you wish some manly hand 
w r ould crash through them and leave them dangling 
brokenly forever % Take Winter as you find him, and he 



28 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

tarns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow, with no non- 
sense in him, and tolerating none in you, which is a 
great comfort in the long run. He is not what they 
call a genial critic ; but bring a real man along with you, 
and you will find there is a crabbed generosity about 
the old cynic that you would not exchange for all the 
creamy concessions of Autumn. " Season of mists and 
mellow fruitfulness," quotha] That 's just it; Winter 
soon blows your head clear of fog and makes you see 
things as they are ; I thank him for it ! The truth is, 
between ourselves, I have a very good opinion of the 
whole family, who always welcome me without making 
me feel as if I were too much of a poor relation. There 
ought to be some kind of distance, never so little, you 
know, to give the true relish. They are as good com- 
pany, the worst of them, as any I know, and I am not a 
little flattered by a condescension from any one of them ; 
but I happen to hold Winter's retainer, this time, and, 
like an honest advocate, am bound to make as good a 
showing as I can for him, even if it cost a few slurs upon 
the rest of the household. Moreover, Winter is coming, 
and one would like to get on the blind side of him. 

The love of Nature in and for herself, or as a mirror 
for the moods of the mind, is a modern thing. The flee- 
ing to her as an escape from man was brought into 
fashion by Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though 
he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true antique 
horror for the grander aspects of nature. He got once 
to the top of Mont Ventoux, but it is very plain that he 
did not enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century or so 
that the search after the picturesque has been a safe em- 
ployment. It is not so even now in Greece or Southern 
Italy. Where the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and 
leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or mediaeval 
man might be pretty confident that some ruffian would 



A GOOD WORD FOE WINTER. 29 

try the edge of his knife on a chicken of the Platonic 
sort, and leave more precious bones as an offering to the 
genius of the place. The ancients were certainly more 
social than we, though that, perhaps, was natural 
enough, when a good part of the world was still covered 
with forest. They huddled together in cities as w T ell for 
safety as to keep their minds warm. The Romans had a 
fondness for country life, but they had fine roads, and 
Rome was always w r ithin easy reach. The author of the 
Book of Job is the earliest I know of who show T ed any 
profound sense of the moral meaning of the outward 
world ; and I think none has approached him since, 
though Wordsworth comes nearest with the first two 
books of the " Prelude." But their feeling is not pre- 
cisely of the kind I speak of as modern, and which gave 
rise to what is called descriptive poetry. Chaucer opens 
his Clerk's Tale with a bit of landscape admirable for its 
large style, and as well composed as any Claude. 

u There is right at the west end of Itaille, 
Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, 
A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, 
Where many a tower and town thou mayst behold, 
That founded were in time of fathers old, 
And many an other delectable sight; 
And Saluces this noble country hight." 

What an airy precision of touch there is here, and 
what a sure eye for the points of character in landscape ! 
But the picture is altogether subsidiary. No doubt 
the w r orks of Salvator Rosa and Caspar Poussin show that 
there must have been some amateur taste for the grand 
and terrible in scenery ; but the British poet Thomson 
(" sweet-souled " is Wordsw T orth's apt word) was the first 
to do with w r ords what they had done partially with 
colors. He was turgid, no good metrist, and his English 
is like a translation from one of those poets w T ho wrote 
in Latin after it was dead ; but he was a man of sincere 



30 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

genius, and not only English, but European literature is 
largely in his debt. He was the inventor of cheap 
amusement for the million, to be had of All-out-doors for 
the asking. It was his impulse which unconsciously 
gave direction to Rousseau, and it is to the school of Jean 
Jacques that we owe St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateaubriand, 
Wordsworth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Buskin, — 
the great painters of ideal landscape. 

So long as men had slender means, whether of keep- 
ing out cold or checkmating it with artificial heat, 
Winter was an unwelcome guest, especially in the coun- 
try. There he was the bearer of a lettre de cachet, 
which shut its victims in solitary confinement with few 
resources but to boose round the fire and repeat ghost- 
stories, which had lost all their freshness and none of 
their terror. To go to bed was to lie awake of cold, 
with an added shudder of fright whenever a loose case- 
ment or a waving curtain chose to give you the goose- 
flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his letters, gives us a 
notion how uncomfortable it was in the country, with 
green wood, smoky chimneys, and doors and windows 
that thought it w T as their duty to make the wind whistle, 
not to keep it out. With fuel so dear, it could not have 
been much better in the city, to judge by Menage's 
warning against the danger of our dressing-gowns taking 
fire, while we cuddle too closely over the sparing blaze. 
The poet of Winter himself is said to have written in 
bed, with his hand through a hole in the blanket ; and 
w r e may suspect that it was the w r armth quite as much 
as the company that first drew men together at the 
coffee-house. Coleridge, in January, 1800, writes to 
Wedge wood : "I am sitting by a fire in a rug great- 
coat It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, 

can shield yourself from it only by perpetual imprison- 
ment." This thermometrical view of winter is, I grant, a 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 31 

depressing one ; for I think there is nothing so demoraliz- 
ing as cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, a 
bitter economist, was brought home dead, said only, 
" Now we can burn as much wood as we like." I would 
not off-hand prophesy the gallows for that boy. I re- 
member with a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once 
in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh air, I found 
myself glad to see the windows hermetically sealed by 
the freezing vapor of our breath, and plotted the assassi- 
nation of the conductor every time he opened the door. 
I felt myself sensibly barbarizing, and would have shared 
Colonel Jack's bed in the ash-hole of the glass-furnace 
with a grateful heart. Since then I have had more 
charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of winter. It was 
natural enough that Ovid should measure the years of 
his exile in Pontus by the number of winters. 

Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister, 

Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris: 
Thrice hath the cold bound Ister fast, since I 
In Pontus was, thrice Euxine's wave made hard. 

Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece of doggerel 
in which Winter and Summer dispute which is the better 
man. It is not without a kind of rough and inchoate 
humor, and I like it because old Whitebeard gets toler- 
ably fair play. The jolly old fellow boasts of his rate of 
living, with that contempt of poverty which is the weak 
spot in the burly English nature. 

Ja Dieu ne place que me avyenge 
Que ne face plus honour 
Et plus despenz en un soul jour 
Que vus en tote vostre vie : 

Now God forbid it hap to me 
That I make not more great display, 
And spend more in a single day 
Than you can do in all your life. 

The best touch, perhaps, is Winter's claim for credit as a 
mender of the highways, which was not without point 



32 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

•when every road in Europe was a quagmire during a good 

part of the year unless it was bottomed on some remains 

of Roman engineering. 

Je su, fet-il, seignur et mestre 
Et a bon droit le dey estre, 
Quant de la bowe face cauce 
Far un petit de geele : 

Master and lord I am, says he, 
And of good right so ought to be, 
Since I make causeys, safely crost, 
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost. 

But there is no recognition of Winter as the best of out- 
door company. 

Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a bringer of it, 
if ever any, confesses, 

" The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, 
Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, 
Curdles the blood to the marble bones, 
Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense, 
And hems in life with narrowing fence." 

Winter was literally " the inverted year," as Thomson 

called him ; for such entertainments as could be had 

must be got within doors. What cheerfulness there was 

in brumal verse was that of Horace's dissolve frigus ligna 

super foco large repone?is, so pleasantly associated with 

the cleverest scene in Roderick Random. This is the 

tone of that poem of Walton's friend Cotton, which won 

the praise of Wordsworth : — 

" Let ns home, 
Our mortal enemy is come; 
Winter and all his blustering train 
Have made a voyage o'er the main. 

" Fly, fly, the foe advances fast ; 
Into our fortress let us haste. 
Where all the roarers of the north 
Can neither storm nor starve ns forth. 

M There underground a mngazine 
Of sovereign juice is cellared in, 
Liquor that will the siege maintain 
Should Phoebus ne'er return again. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 33 

"Whilst we together jovial sit 
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit, 
Where, though bleak winds confine us home 
Our fancies round the world shall roam." 

Thomson's view of Winter is also, on the whole, a hostile 
one, though he does justice to his grandeur. 

'• Thus Winter falls, 
A heavy gloom oppressive o'er the woild, 
Through Nature shedding influence malign." 

He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the house, 
though more refined : — 

'* While without 
The ceaseless winds blow ice. be my retreat 
Between the groaning forest and the shore 
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, 
A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, 
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join 
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit 
And hold high converse with the might}'- dead." 

Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with respect, 

follows Thomson. With him, too, "Winter desolates 

the year," and 

"How pleasing weai*s the wintry night 
Spent with the old illustrious dead ! 
While by the taper's trembling light 
I seem those awful scenes to tread 
Where chiefs or legislators lie," &c. 

Akenside had evidently been reading Thomson. He 
had the conceptions of a great poet with less faculty than 
many a little one, and is one of those versifiers of whom 
it is enough to say that we are always willing to break 
him off in the middle with an <fec, well knowing that 
what follows is but the coming-round again of what went 
before, marching in a circle with the cheap numerosity 
of a stage-army. In truth, it is no wonder that the short 
days of that cloudy northern climate should have added 
to winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. We hardly 
know, till we have experienced the contrast, how sensibly 
our winter is alleviated by the longer daylight and the 
2* Q 



34 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

pellucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in Dresden, 
a southern climate compared with England, and really 
almost lost my respect for the sun when I saw him grop- 
ing among the chimney-pots opposite my windows as he 
described his impoverished arc in the sky. The enforced 
seclusion of the season makes it the time for serious study 
and occupations that demand fixed incomes of unbroken 
time. This is why Milton said " that his vein never 
happily flowed but from the autumnal equinox to the 
vernal," though in his twentieth year he had written, on 
the return of spring, — ■ 

Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires 
Ingeniumque mini munere veris adest ? 

Err I ? or do the powers of song return 

To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? 

Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first to notice 
the cheerfulness of snow in sunshine. His Harz-reise im 
Winter gives no hint of it, for that is a diluted reminis- 
cence of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of Job in 
nearly equal parts. In one of the singularly interesting 
and characteristic letters to Frau von Stein, however, 
written during the journey, he says : " It is beautiful in- 
deed ; the mist heaps itself together in light snow-clouds, 
the sun looks through, and the snow over everything 
gives back a feeling of gayety." But I find in Cowper 
the first recognition of a general amiability in Winter. 
The gentleness of his temper, and the wide charity of 
his sympathies, made it natural for him to find good in 
everything except the human heart. A dreadful creed 
distilled from the darkest moments of dyspeptic solitaries 
compelled him against his will to see in that the one evil 
thing made by a God whose goodness is over all his 
works. Cowper's two w 7 alks in the morning and noon of 
a winter's day are delightful, so long as he contrives to 
let himself be happy in the graciousness of the landscape. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 35 

Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs dilate with 
the crisp air as you walk along with him. You laugh 
with him at the grotesque shadow of your legs lengthened 
across the snow by the just-risen sun. I know nothing 
that gives a purer feeling of out-door exhilaration than 
the easy verses of this escaped hypochondriac. But 
Cowper also preferred his sheltered garden-walk to those 
robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the depressing 
influence of the darkened year. In December, 1780, he 
writes : " At this season of the year, and in this gloomy 
uncomfortable climate, it is no easy matter for the owner 
of a mind like mine to divert it from sad subjects, and to 
fix it upon such as may administer to its amusement." 
Or was it because he was writing to the dreadful Newton 1 
Perhaps his poetry bears truer witness to his habitual 
feeling, for it is only there that poets disenthral them- 
selves of their reserve and become fully possessed of their 
greatest charm, — the power of being franker than other 
men. In the Third Book of the Task he boldly affirms 
his preference of the country to the city even in winter : — 

" But are not -wholesome airs, though unperfumed 
By roses, and clear suns, though scarcely felt, 
And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure 
From clamor, and whose very silence charms, 
To be preferred to smoke ? . . . . 
They would be, were not madness in the head 
And folly in the heart ; were England now 
What England was, plain, hospitable kind, 
And undebauched." 

The conclusion shows, however, that he was thinking 
mainly of fireside delights, not of the blusterous com- 
panionship of nature. This appears even more clearly in 
the Fourth Book : — 

" Winter, ruler of the inverted year " ; 

but I cannot help interrupting him to say how pleasant 
it always is to track poets through the gardens of their 



36 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

predecessors and find out their likings by a flower 
snapped off here and there to garnish their own nosegays. 
Cowper had been reading Thomson, and "the inverted 
year " pleased his fancy with its suggestion of that starry 
wheel of the zodiac moving round through its spaces infi- 
nite. He could not help loving a handy Latinism (espe- 
cially with elision beauty added), any more than Gray, 
any more than Wordsworth, — on the sly. But the 
member for Olney has the floor : — 

" Winter, ruler of the inverted year, 
Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled, 
Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks 
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows 
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, 
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne 
A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, 
But urged by storms along its slippery way, 
I love thee all unlovely as thou seem'st, 
And dreaded as thou art ! Thou hold'st the sun 
A prisoner in the yet undawning east, 
Shortening his journey between morn and noon, 
And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, 
Down to the rosy west, but kindly still 
Compensating his loss with added hours 
Of social converse and instructive ease, 
And gathering at short notice, in one group, 
The family dispersed, and fixing thought, 
Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. 
I crown thee king of intimate delights, 
Fireside enjoyments, homeborn happiness, 
And all the comforts that the lowly roof 
Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours 
Of long uninterrupted evening know." 

I call this a good human bit of writing, imaginative, 
too, — not so flushed, not so ... . highfaluting (let me 
dare the odious word !) as the modern style since poets 
have got hold of a theory that imagination is common- 
sense turned inside out, and not common-sense sublimed, 
■ — but wholesome, masculine, and strong in the simplicity 
of a mind wholly occupied with its theme. To me Cow- 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 37 

per is still the best of our descriptive poets for erery-day 
wear. And what unobtrusive skill he has ! How he 
heightens, for example, your sense of winter-evening se j 
elusion, by the twanging horn of the postman on the 
bridge ! That horn has rung in my ears ever since I 
first heard it, during the consulate of the second Adams. 
Wordsworth strikes a deeper note ; but does it not some- 
times come over one (just the least in the world) that 
one would give anything for a bit of nature pure and 
simple, without quite so strong a flavor of W. W. 1 W. W. 
is, of course, sublime and all that — but ! For my part, 
I will make a clean breast of it, and confess that I can't 
look at a mountain without fancying the late laureate's 
gigantic Roman nose thrust between me and it, and think- 
ing of Dean Swift's profane version of Romanos rerum 
dominos into Roman nose ! a rare un ! dom your nose ! 
But do I judge verses, then, by the impression made on 
me by the man who wrote them % Not so fast, my good 
friend, but, for good or evil, the character and its intel- 
lectual product are inextricably interfused. 

If I remember aright, Wordsworth himself (except in 
his magnificent skating-scene in the " Prelude") has not 
much to say for winter out of doors. I cannot recall 
any picture by him of a snow-storm. The reason may 
possibly be that in the Lake Country even the winter 
storms bring rain rather than snow. He was thankful 
for the Christmas visits of Crabb Robinson, because they 
"helped him through the winter." His only hearty 
praise of winter is when, as General Fevrier, he defeats 
the French : — 

" Humanity, delighting to behold 
A fond reflection of her own decay, 
Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, 
Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day, 
In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain 
As though his weakness were disturbed by pain: 



'38 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

Or, if ajuster fancy should allow 
An undisputed symbol of command, 
The chosen sceptre is a withered bough 
Infirmly grasped within a withered hand. 
These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn; 
But mighty Winter the device shall scorn." 

The Scottish poet Grahame, in his "Sabbath," says 

manfully : — 

" Now is the time 
To visit Nature in her grand attire " ; 

and he has one little picture which no other poet has 

surpassed : — 

"High-ridged the whirled drift has almost reached 
The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch : 
Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried." 

Even in our own climate, where the sun shows his win- 
ter face as long and as brightly as in central Italy, the 
seduction of the chimney-corner is apt to predominate in 
the mind over the severer satisfactions of muffled fields 
and penitential w T oods. The very title of Whittier's de- 
lightful " Snow-Bound " shows what he was thinking of, 
though he does vapor a little about digging out paths. 
The verses of Emerson, perfect as a Greek fragment 
(despite the archaism of a dissyllabic fire), which he has 
chosen for his epigraph, tell us, too, how the 

" Housemates sit 
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed 
In a tumultuous privacy of storm." 

They are all in a tale. It is always the tristis Hienis 
of Virgil. Catch one of them having a kind word for old 
Barbe Fleurie, unless he whines through some cranny, 
like a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while they 
toast their slippered toes. I grant there is a keen relish 
of contrast about the bickering flame as it gives an 
emphasis beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, or 
kindles the gloomy gold of volumes scarce less friendly, 
especially when a tempest is blundering round the 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 39 

house. Wordsworth has a fine touch that brings home 
to us the comfortable contrast of without and within, 
during a storm at night, and the passage is highly 
characteristic of a poet whose inspiration always has an 
undertone of bourgeois : — 

" How touching, when, at midnight, sweep 
Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, 
To hear, — and sink again to sleep ! " 

J. H., one of those choice poets who will not tarnish 
their bright fancies by publication, always insists on a 
snow-storm as essential to the true atmosphere of whist. 
Mrs. Battles, in her famous rule for the game, implies 
winter, and would doubtless have added tempest, if it 
could be had for the asking. For a good solid read also, 
into the small hours, there is nothing like that sense of 
safety against having your evening laid waste, which 
Euroclydon brings, as he bellows down the chimney, 
making your fire gasp, or rustles snow-flakes against the 
pane with a sound more soothing than silence. Emer- 
son, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail on the 
head, but drove it home, in that last phrase of the 
" tumultuous privacy." 

But I would exchange this, and give something to 
boot, for the privilege of walking out into the vast blur 
of a north-northeast snow-storm, and getting a strong 
draught on the furnace within, by drawing the first fur- 
rows through its sandy drifts. I love those 

"Noontide twilights which snow makes 
With tempest of the blinding flakes." 

If the wind veer too much toward the east, you get the 
heavy snow that gives a true Alpine slope to the boughs 
of your evergreens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in 
white ; but you must have plenty of north in your gale 
if you want those driving nettles of frost that sting the 
cheeks to a crimson manlier than that of fire. During 



40 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

the great storm of two winters .ago, the most robustious 
periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded and floun- 
dered a couple of miles through the whispering night, 
and brought home that feeling of expansion we have 
after being in good company. " Great things doeth He 
which we cannot comprehend ; for he saith to the snow, 
1 Be thou on the earth.' " 

' There is admirable snow scenery in Judd's " Marga- 
ret," but some one has confiscated my copy of that ad- 
mirable book, and, perhaps, Homer's picture of a snow- 
storm is the best yet in its large simplicity : — 

'' And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp javelins throws 
Amongst us mortals, and is moved to white the earth with snows, 
The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest prominents, 
Hill-tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown with most contents 
The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, and every place, 
But floods, that fair snow's tender flakes, as their own brood, em- 
brace." 

Chapman, after all, though he makes very free with 

him, comes nearer Homer than anybody else. There is 

nothing in the original of that fair snow's tender flakes, 

but neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of their 

heads the Psalmist's tender phrase, " He giveth his snow 

like wool," for which also Homer affords no hint. Pope 

talks of "dissolving fleeces," and Cowper of a "fleecy 

mantle." But David is nobly simple, while Pope is 

simply nonsensical, and Cowper pretty. If they must 

have prettiness, Martial would have supplied them with 

it in his 

Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum, 

which is too pretty, though I fear it would have pleased 
Dr. Donne. Eustathius of Thessalonica calls snow vdap 
fptoides, woolly water, which a poor old French poet, 
Godeau, has amplified into this : — 

Lorsque la froidure inhumaine 
De leur verd ornement depouille les forets 
Sous une neige epaisse il couvre les gueVets, 
Et la neige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 41 

In this, as in Pope's version of the passage in Homer, 
there is, at least, a sort of suggestion of snow-storm in 
the blinding drift of words. But, on the whole, if one 
would know what snow is, T should advise him not to 
hunt up what the poets have said about it, but to look 
at the sweet miracle itself. 

The preludings of Winter are as beautiful as those of 
Spring. In a gray December day, when, as the farmers 
say, it is too cold to snow, his numbed fingers will let 
fall doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snow T -drops 
and anemones that harbinger his more assured reign. 
Now, and now only, may be seen, heaped on the hori- 
zon's eastern edge, those " blue clouds " from forth 
which Shakespeare says that Mars " doth pluck the 
masoned turrets." Sometimes also, when the sun is 
low, you will see a single cloud trailing a flurry of snow 
along the southern hills in a wavering fringe of purple. 
And when at last the real snow-storm comes, it leaves 
the earth with a virginal look on it that no other of the 
seasons can rival, — compared with which, indeed, they 
seem soiled and vulgar. 

And what is there in nature so beautiful as the next 
morning after such confusion of the elements'? Night 
has no silence like this of busy day. All the batteries, 
of noise are spiked. We see the movement of life as a 
deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the clamorous exist- 
ence that inflicts itself on our ears when the ground is 
bare. The earth is clothed in innocence as a garment. 
Every wound of the landscape is healed ; whatever was 
stiff has been sw r eetly rounded as the breasts of Aphro- 
dite ; what was unsightly has been covered gently with 
a soft splendor, as if, Cowley would have said, Nature 
had cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it. If the 
Virgin (Notre Dame de la neir/e) were to come back, here 
is an earth that would not bruise her foot nor stain it. 



42 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

It is 

" The fanned snow 
That 's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er," — 
Soffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, 
Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds, — 

packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that it will bear 
your weight. What grace is in all the curves, as if 
every one of them had been swept by that inspired 
thumb of Phidias's journeyman I 

Poets have fancied the footprints of the wind in those 
light ripples that sometimes scurry across smooth water 
with a sudden blur. But on this gleaming hush the 
aerial deluge has left plain marks of its course ; and 
in gullies through which it rushed torrent-like, the eye 
finds its bed irregularly scooped like that of a brook in 
hard beach-sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with 
outlines like those left by the sliding edges of the surf 
upon the shore. The air, after all, is only an infinitely 
thinner kind of water, such as I suppose we shall have 
to drink when the state does her whole duty as a moral 
reformer. Nor is the wind the only thing whose trail 
you will notice on this sensitive surface. You will find 
that 3?ou have more neighbors and night visitors than 
you dreamed of. Here is the dainty footprint of a cat ; 
here a dog has looked in on you like an amateur watch- 
man to see if all is right, slumping clumsily about in the 
mealy treachery. And look ! before you were up in the 
morning, though you were a punctual courtier at the 
sun's levee, here has been a squirrel zigzagging to and 
fro like a hound gathering the scent, and some tiny bird 
searching for unimaginable food, — perhaps for the tinier 
creature, whatever it is, that drew this slender continu- 
ous trail like those made on the wet beach by light 
borderers of the sea. The earliest autographs were as 
frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or giant birds 
made their mark, on preadamite sea-margins ; and the 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 43 

thunder-gust left the tear-stains of its sudden passion 
there ; nay, we have the signatures of delicatest fern- 
leaves on the soft ooze of eeoiis that dozed away their 
dreamless leisure before consciousness came upon the 
earth with man. Some whim of nature locked them fast 
in stone for us after-thoughts of creation. Which of us 
shall leave a footprint as imperishable as that of the 
ornithorhyncus, or much more so than that of these 
Bedouins of the snow-desert 1 Perhaps it was only be- 
cause the ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were not 
thinking of themselves, that they had such luck. The 
chances of immortality depend very much on that. How 
often have we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a season's 
notoriety, carving their names on seeming-solid rock of 
merest beach-sand, whose feeble hold on memory shall 
be washed away by the next wave of fickle opinion ! 
Well, well, honest Jacques, there are better things to be 
found in the snow than sermons. 

The snow that falls damp comes commonly in larger 
flakes from windless skies, and is the prettiest of all to 
watch from under cover. This is the kind Homer had 
in mind ; and Dante, who had never read him, compares 
the dilatate /aide, the flaring flakes, of his fiery rain, to 
those of snow among the mountains without wind. This 
sort of snowfall has no fight in it, and does not challenge 
you to a wrestle like that which drives well from the 
northward, with all moisture thoroughly winnowed out 
of it by the frosty wind. Burns, who was more out of 
doors than most poets, and whose barefoot Muse got the 
color in her cheeks by vigorous exercise in all weathers, 
was thinking of this drier deluge, when he speaks of the 
" whirling drift," and tells how 

" Chanticleer 
Shook off the powthery snaw." 

But the damper and more deliberate falls have a choice 



44 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

knack at draping the trees ; and about eaves or stone- 
walls, wherever, indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it 
finds a chance to cling, it will build itself out in curves 
of wonderful beauty. I have seen one of these dumb 
waves, thus caught in the act of breaking, curl four feet 
beyond the edge of my roof and hang there for days, as 
if Nature were too well pleased with her work to let it 
crumble from its exquisite pause. After such a storm, 
if you are lucky enough to have even a sluggish ditch 
for a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You will find 
its banks corniced with what seems precipitated light, 
and the dark current down below gleams as if with an 
inward lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never saw 
water that seemed alive before. It has a brightness, 
like that of the eyes of some smaller animals, which 
gives assurance of life, but of a life foreign and unintel- 
ligible. 

A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, and, in our 
freakish climate, the wind will whisk sometimes into the 
northwest so suddenly as to plate all the trees with crys- 
tal before it has swept the sky clear of its last cobweb 
of cloud. Ambrose Philips, in a poetical epistle from 
Copenhagen to the Earl of Dorset, describes this strange 
confectionery of Nature, — for such, I am half ashamed 
to say, it always seems to me, recalling the " glorified 
sugar-candy " of Lamb's first night at the theatre. It 
has an artificial air, altogether beneath the grand artist 
of the atmosphere, and besides does too much mischief 
to the trees for a philodendrist to take unmixed pleasure 
in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet like Philips, who 
really loved Nature and yet liked her to be mighty fine, 
as Pepys would say, with a heightening of powder and 
rouge : — 

" And yet but lately have I seen e'en here 
The winter in a lovely dress appear. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 45 

Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow, 

Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow, 

At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, 

And the descending rain unsullied froze. 

Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, 

The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view 

The face of Nature in a rich disguise, 

And brightened every object to my eyes; 

For every shrub, and every blade of grass, 

And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass; 

In pearls and rubies rich the hawthorns show, 

And through the ice the crimson berries glow; 

The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield, 

Seem polished lances in a hostile field; 

The stag in limpid currents with surprise 

Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise; 

The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine, 

Glazed over in the freezing ether shine; 

The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, 

Which wave and glitter in the distant sun, 

When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, 

The brittle forest into atom? flies, 

The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends 

And in a spangled shower the prospect ends." 

It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable Ambrose is, 
so long as he sticks manfully to what he really saw. 
The moment he undertakes to improve on Nature he 
sinks into the mere court poet, and we surrender him to 
the jealousy of Pope without a sigh. His "rattling- 
branches " and " crackling forest " are good, as truth al- 
ways is after a fashion ; but what shall we say of that 
dreadful stag which, there is little doubt, he valued 
above all the rest, because it was purely his own 1 

The damper snow tempts the amateur architect and 
sculptor. His Pentelicus has been brought to his very 
door, and if there are boys to be had (whose company 
beats all other recipes for prolonging life) a middle-aged 
Master of the Works will knock the years off his ac- 
count and make the family Bible seem a dealer in foolish 
fables, by a few hours given heartily to this business. 
First comes the Sisyphean toil of rolling the clammy 



46 A GOOD WOKD FOR W1KTER. 

balls till they refuse to budge farther. Then, if you 
would play the statuary, they are piled one upon the 
other to the proper height ; or if your aim be masonry, 
whether of house or fort, they must be squared and 
beaten solid with the shovel. The material is capable 
of very pretty effects, and your young companions mean- 
while are unconsciously learning lessons in aesthetics. 
From the feeling of satisfaction with which one squats 
on the damp floor of his extemporized dwelling, I have 
been led to think that the backwoodsman must get a 
sweeter savor of self-reliance from the house his own 
hands have built than Bramante or Sansovino could ever 
give. Perhaps the fort is the best thing, for it calls out 
more masculine qualities and adds the cheer of battle 
with that dumb artillery which gives pain enough to 
test pluck without risk of serious hurt. Already, as I 
write, it is twenty-odd years ago. The balls fly thick 
and fast. The uncle defends the waist-high ramparts 
against a storm of nephews, his breast plastered with 
decorations like another Radetsky's. How well I recall 
the indomitable good-humor under fire of him who fell 
in the front at Ball's Bluff, the silent pertinacity of the 
gentle scholar who got his last hurt at Fair Oaks, the 
ardor in the charge of the gallant gentleman who, with 
the death-wound in his side, headed his brigade at Cedar 
Creek ! How it all comes back, and they never come ! 
I cannot again be the Vauban of fortresses in the inno- 
cent snow, but I shall never see children moulding their 
clumsy giants in it without longing to help. It was a 
pretty fancy of the young Vermont sculptor to make his 
first essay in this evanescent material. Was it a figure 
of Youth, I wonder 1 Would it not be well if all artists 
could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt away when the 
sun of prosperity -began to shine, and leave nothing be- 
hind but the gain of practised hands 1 It is pleasant 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 47 

to fancy that Shakespeare served his apprenticeship at 
this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic of despair, 
ing wishes, — 

44 0, that I were a mockery-king of snow, 
Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke, 
To melt myself away in water-drops ! " 

I have spoken of the exquisite curves of snow sur- 
faces. Not less rare are the tints of which they are 
capable, — the faint blue of the hollows, for the shadows 
in snow are always blue, and the tender rose of higher 
points, as you stand with your back to the setting sun 
and look upward across the soft rondure of a hillside. 
I have seen within a mile of home effects of color as 
lovely as any iridescence of the Silberhorn after sun- 
down. Charles II., who never said a foolish thing, gave 
the English climate the highest praise when he said that 
it allowed you more hours out of doors than any other, 
and I think our winter may fairly make the same boast 
as compared with the rest of the year. Its still morn- 
ings, with the thermometer near zero, put a premium on 
walking. There is more sentiment in turf, perhaps, and 
it is more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, is wellnigh 
as congenial with meditation as that of fallen pine-tassel; 
but for exhilaration there is nothing like a stiff snow- 
crust that creaks like a cricket at every step, and com- 
municates its own sparkle to the senses. The air you 
drink is frappe, all its grosser particles precipitated, and 
the dregs of your blood with them. A purer current 
mounts to the brain, courses sparkling through it, and 
rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. There is 
nothing left to breed an exhalation of ill-humor or 
despondency. They say that this rarefied atmosphere 
has lessened the capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart- 
pots are for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, the 
city in winter is infinitely dreary, — the sharp street- 



48 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

corners have such a chill in them, and the snow so soon 
loses its maidenhood to become a mere drab, — " doing 
shameful things," as Steele says of politicians, u without 
being ashamed." I pine for the Quaker purity of my 
country landscape. I am speaking, of course, of those 
winters that are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often 
are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Nothing can be 
unsightlier than those piebald fields where the coarse 
brown hide of Earth shows through the holes of her 
ragged ermine. But even when there is abundance of 
snow, I find as I grow older that there are not so many 
good crusts as there used to be. When I first observed 
this, I rashly set it to the account of that general 
degeneracy in nature (keeping pace with the same 
melancholy phenomenon in man) which forces itself up- 
on the attention and into the philosophy of middle life. 
But happening once to be weighed, it occurred to me 
that an arch which would bear fifty pounds could hardly 
be blamed for giving way under more than three times 
the weight. I have sometimes thought that if theologians 
would remember this in their arguments, and consider 
that the man may slump through, with no fault of his 
own, where the bo} r would have skimmed the surface in 
safety, it would be better for all parties. However, 
when you do get a crust that will bear, and know any 
brooklet that runs down a hillside, be sure to go and 
take a look at him, especially if your crust is due, as it 
commonly is, to a cold snap following eagerly on a thaw. 
You will never find him so cheerful. As he shrank 
away after the last thaw, he built for himself the most 
exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if not " measure- 
less to man " like those of Alph, the sacred river, yet 
perhaps more pleasing for their narrowness than those 
for their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith is 
Frost ! The rarest workmanship of Delhi or Genoa 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 49 

copies him but clumsily, as if the fingers of all other 
artists were thumbs. Fernwork and lacework and fila- 
gree in endless variety, and under it all the water tinkles 
like a distant guitar, or drums like a tambourine, or 
gurgles like the Tokay of an anchorite's dream. Be- 
yond doubt there is a fairy procession marching along 
those frail arcades and translucent corridors. 

" Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill, 
The hemlock small blow clear." 

And hark ! is that the ringing of Titania's bridle, or the 
bells of the wee, wee hawk that sits on Oberon's wrist I 
This wonder of Frost's handiwork may be had every 
winter, but he can do better than this, though I have 
seen it but once in my life. There had been a thaw 
without wind or rain, making the air fat with gray vapor. 
Towards sundown came that chill, the avant-courier of 
a northwesterly gale. Then, though there was no per- 
cejDtible current in the atmosphere, the fog began to 
attach itself in frosty roots and filaments to the southern 
side of every twig and grass-stem. The very posts had 
poems traced upon them by this dumb minstrel. 
Wherever the moist seeds found lodgement grew an 
inch-deep moss fine as cobweb, a slender coral-reef, 
argentine, delicate, as of some silent sea in the moon, 
such as Agassiz dredges when he dreams. The frost, 
too, can wield a delicate graver, and in fancy leaves 
Piranesi far behind. He covers your window-pane with 
Alpine etchings, as if in memory of that sanctuary where 
he finds shelter even in midsummer. 

Now look down from your hillside across the valley. 
The trees are leafless, but this is the season to study 
their anatomy, and did you ever notice before how much 
color there is in the twigs of many of them 1 And the 
smoke from those chimneys is so blue it seems like a 
feeder of the sky into which it flows. Winter refines it 
3 d 



50 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

and gives it agreeable associations. In summer it sug« 

gests cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, but now 

your fancy (if it can forget for a moment the dreary 

usurpation of stoves) traces it down to the fireside and 

the brightened faces of children. Thoreau is the only 

poet who has fitly sung it. The wood-cutter rises before 

day and 

" First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad 
His early scout, his emissary, smoke, 
The earliest, latest pilgrim from his roof, 
To fed the frosty air ; . . . . 
And, while he crouches still beside the hearth, 
Nor musters courage to unbar the door, 
It has gone down the glen with the light wind 
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath. 
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, 
And warmed the pinions of the early bird ; 
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air, 
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge, 
And greets its master's eye at his low door 
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sky." 

Here is very bad verse and very good imagination. He 
had been reading Wordsworth, or he would not have 
made tree-tops an iambus. In the Moretum of Virgil (or, 
if not his, better than most of his) is a pretty picture 
of a peasant kindling his winter-morning fire. He rises 
before dawn, 

Sollicitaque manu tenebras explorat inertes 
Vestigatque focum laesns qnem denique sensit. 
Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite fumus, 
Et cinis obductas celabat lumina prunae. 
Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam, 
Et producit acu stupas humore carentes, 
Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus i^nem ; 
Tandem concepto tenebras fulgore recedunt, 
Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura. 
With cautions hand he gropes the sluggish dark, 
Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong. 
In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained, 
And raked-up ashes hid the cinders' eyes: 
Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears, 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 51 

And, with a needle loosening the dry wick 
With frequent breath excites the languid flame. 
Before the gathering glow the shades recede, 
And his bent hand the new-caught light defends. 

Ovid heightens the picture by a single touch : — 

Ipse genu poito flamraas exsuscitat aura. 
Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames. 

If you walk down now into the woods, you may find a 
robin or a blue-bird among the red-cedars, or a nuthatch 
scaling deviously the trunk of some hardwood tree with 
an eye as keen as that of a French soldier foraging for 
the pot-au-feu of his mess. Perhaps a blue-jay shrills 
cah cah in his corvine trebles, or a chickadee 

" Shows feats of his gymnastic play, 
Head downward, clinging to the spray. 1 ' 

But both him and the snow-bird I love better to see, 
tiny fluffs of feathered life, as they scurry about in a 
driving mist of snow, than in this serene air. 

Coleridge has put into verse one of the most beautiful 
phenomena of a winter walk : — 

*« The woodman winding westward up the glen 
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze 
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 
Sees full before him, gliding without tread, 
An image with a halo round its head." 

But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. I have noticed 
it often in a summer morning, when the grass was heavy 
with dew, and even later in the day, when the dewless 
grass was still fresh enough to have a gleam of its own. 
For my own part I prefer a winter walk that takes in 
the nightfall and the intense silence that erelong follows 
it. The evening lamps looks yellower by contrast with 
the snow, and give the windows that hearty look of 
which our secretive fires have almost robbed them. The 
stars seem 



52 A GOOD WORD FOE WINTER. 

To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, 
Among the branches of the leafless trees," 

or, if you are on a hill-top (whence it Is sweet to watch 

the home-lights gleam out one by one), they look nearer 

than in summer, and appear to take a conscious part in 

the cold. Especially in one of those stand-stills of the 

air that forebode a change of weather, the sky is dusted 

with motes of fire of which the summer-watcher never 

dreamed. Winter, too, is, on the whole, the triumphant 

season of the moon, a moon devoid of sentiment, if you 

choose, but with the refreshment of a purer intellectual 

light, — the cooler orb of middle life. Who ever saw 

anything to match that gleam, rather divined than seen, 

which runs before her over the snow, a breath of light, 

as she rises on the infinite silence of winter night 1 High 

in the heavens, also she seems to bring out some intenser 

property of cold with her chilly polish. The poets have 

instinctively noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates 

a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, she has 

" The cold, cold moon above her head " ; 

and Coleridge speaks of 

" The silent icicles, 
Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon." 

As you walk homeward, — for it is time that we should 

end our ramble, — you may perchance hear the most 

impressive sound in nature, unless it be the fall of a tree 

in the forest during the hush of summer noon. It is the 

stifled shriek of the lake yonder as the frost throttles it. 

Wordsworth has described it (too much, I fear, in the 

style of Dr. Armstrong) : — 

" And, interrupting oft that eager game, 
From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice, 
The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 
Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud 
Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves 
Howling in troops along the Bothnic main." 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 53 

Thoreau (unless the English lakes have a different dia- 
lect from ours) calls it admirably well a " whoop." But 
it is a noise like none other, as if Demogorgon were 
moaning inarticulately from under the earth. Let us 
get within doofs, lest we hear it again, for there is some- 
thing bodeful and uncanny in it. 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN 
FOREIGNERS. 



WALKING one day toward the Village, as we used 
to call it in the good old days when almost every 
dweller in the town had been born in it, I was enjoying 
that delicious sense of disenthralment from the actual 
which the deepening twilight brings w T ith it, giving 
as it does a sort of obscure novelty to things familiar. 
The coolness, the hush, broken only by the distant bleat 
of some belated goat, querulous to be disburthened of her 
milky load, the few faint stars, more guessed as yet than 
seen, the sense that the coming dark would so soon fold 
me in the secure privacy of its disguise, — all things 
combined in a result as near absolute peace as can be 
hoped for by a man who knows that there is a writ out 
against him in the hands of the printer's devil. For the 
moment, I was enjoying the blessed privilege of thinking 
without being called on to stand and deliver what I 
thought to the small public who are good enough to take 
any interest therein. I love old ways, and the path I 
was walking felt kindly to the feet it had known for al- 
most fifty years. How many fleeting impressions it had 
shared with me ! How many times I had lingered to 
study the shadows of the leaves mezzotinted upon the 
turf that edged it by the moon, of the bare boughs etched 
with a touch beyond Rembrandt by the same unconscious 
artist on the smooth page of snow ! If I turned round, 
through dusky tree-gaps came the first twinkle of even- 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 55 

ing lamps in the dear old homestead. On Corey's hill I 
could see these tiny pharoses of love and home and sweet 
domestic thoughts flash out one by one across the black- 
ening salt-meadow between. How much has not kerosene 
added to the cheerfulness of our evening landscape ! A 
pair of night-herons flapped heavily over me toward the 
hidden river. The war was ended. I might walk town- 
ward without that aching dread of bulletins that had 
darkened the July sunshine and twice made the scarlet 
leaves of October seem stained with blood. I remem- 
bered w T ith a pang, half-proud, half-painful, how, so many 
years ago, I had walked over the same path and felt 
round my finger the soft pressure of a little hand that 
was one day to harden with faithful grip of sabre. On 
how many paths, leading to how many homes w T here proud 
Memory does all she can to fill up the fireside gaps with 
shining shapes, must not men be walking in just such 
pensive mood as I % Ah, young heroes, safe in immortal 
youth as those of Homer, you at least carried your ideal 
hence untarnished ! It is locked for you beyond moth or 
rust in the treasure-chamber of Death. 

Is not a country, I thought, that has had such as they 
in it, that could give such as they a brave joy in dying 
for it, worth something, then 1 And as I felt more and 
more the soothing magic of evening's cool palm upon my 
temples, as my fancy came home from its revery, and my 
senses, with reawakened curiosity, ran to the front win- 
dows again from the viewless closet of abstraction, and 
felt a strange charm in finding the old tree and shabby 
fence still there under the travesty of falling night, nay, 
were conscious of an unsuspected newness in familiar 
stars and the fading outlines of hills my earliest horizon, 
I was conscious of an immortal soul, and could not but 
rejoice in the unwaning goodliness of the world into which 
I had been born without any merit of my own. I thought 



56 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

of dear Henry Vaughan's rainbow, " Still young and 
fine ! " I remembered people who had to go over to the 
Alps to learn what the divine silence of snow was, who 
must run to Italy before they were conscious of the mir- 
acle wrought every day under their very noses by the 
sunset, who must call upon the Berkshire hills to teach 
them what a painter autumn was, while close at hand 
the Fresh Pond meadows made all oriels cheap with 
hues that showed as if a sunset-cloud had been wrecked 
among their maples. One might be worse off than even 
in America, I thought. There are some things so elastic 
that even the heavy roller of democracy cannot flatten 
them altogether down. The mind can weave itself 
warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts and dwell a 
hermit anywhere. A country without traditions, with- 
out ennobling associations, a scramble of parvenus, with 
a horrible consciousness of shoddy running through poli- 
tics, manners, art, literature, nay, religion itself 1 I con- 
fess, it did not seem so to me there in that illimitable 
quiet, that serene self-possession of nature, where Collins 
might have brooded his " Ode to Evening," or where 
those verses on Solitude in Dodsley's Collection, that 
Hawthorne liked so much, might have been composed. 
Traditions ? Granting that we had none, all that is worth 
having in them is the common property of the soul, — 
an estate in gavelkind for all the sons of Adam, — and, 
moreover, if a man cannot stand on his two feet (the 
prime quality of whoever has left any tradition behind 
him), were it not better for him to be honest about it at 
once, and go down on all fours 1 And for associations, if 
one have not the wit to make them for himself out of his 
native earth, no ready-made ones of other men will avail 
him much. Lexington is none the worse to me for not 
being in Greece, nor Gettysburg that its name is not 
Marathon. "Blessed old fields," I was just exclaiming 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 57 

to myself, like one of Mrs. RadclhTe's heroes, " dear acres, 
innocently secure from history, which these eyes first be- 
held, may you be also those to which they shall at last 
slowly darken ! " when I was interrupted by a voice 
which asked me in German whether I was the Herr Pro- 
fessor, Doctor, So-and-so 1 The " Doctor " was by brevet 
or vaticination, to make the grade easier to my pocket. 

One feels so intimately assured that he is made up, 
in part, of shreds and leavings of the past, in part of 
the interpolations of other people, that an honest man 
would be slow in saying yes to such a question. But 
" my name is So-and-so " is a safe answer, and I gave it. 
While I had been romancing with myself, the street- 
lamps had been lighted, and it was under one of these 
detectives that have robbed the Old Road of its privilege 
of sanctuary after nightfall that I was ambushed by my 
foe. The inexorable villain had taken my description, it 
appears, that I might have the lefes chance to escape 
him. Dr. Holmes tells us that we change our substance, 
not every seven years, as was once believed, but with 
every breath we draw. Why had I not the wit to avail 
myself of the subterfuge, and, like Peter, to renounce 
my identity, especially, as in certain moods of mind, I 
have often more than doubted of it myself ? When a 
man is, as it were, his own front-door, and is thus 
knocked at, why may he not assume the right of that 
sacred wood to make every house a castle, by denying 
himself to all visitations 1 I was truly not at home 
when the question was put to me, but had to recall my- 
self from all out-of-doors, and to piece my self-conscious- 
ness hastily together as well as I could before I an- 
swered it. 

I knew perfectly well what was coming. It is seldom 
that debtors or good Samaritans waylay people under 
gas-lamps in order to force money upon them, so far as I 
3* 



58 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

have seen or heard. I was also aware, from considerable 
experience, that every foreigner is persuaded that, by 
doing this country the favor of corning to it, he has laid 
every native thereof under an obligation, pecuniary or 
other, as the case may be, whose discharge he is entitled- 
to on demand duly made in person or by letter. Too 
much learning (of this kind) had made me mad in the 
provincial sense of the word. I had begun life with the 
theory of giving something to every beggar that came 
along, though sure of never finding a native-born coun- 
tryman among them. In a small way, I was resolved 
to emulate Hatem Tai's tent, with its three hundred 
and sixty-five entrances, one for every day in the year, 

I know not whether he was astronomer enough to 

add another for leap-years. The beggars were a kind 
of German-silver aristocracy ; not real plate, to be sure, 
but better than nothing. Where everybody was over- 
worked, they supplied the comfortable equipoise of 
absolute leisure, so aesthetically needful. Besides, I was 
but too conscious of a vagrant fibre in myself, which too 
often thrilled me in my solitary walks with the temp- 
tation to wander on into infinite space, and by a single 
spasm of resolution to emancipate myself from the 
drudgery of prosaic serfdom to respectability and the 
regular course of things. This prompting has been at 
times my familiar demon, and I could not but feel a 
kind of respectful sympathy for men who had dared 
what I had only sketched out to myself as a splendid 
possibility. For seven years I helped maintain one 
heroic man on an imaginary journey to Portland, — as 
fine an example as I have ever known of hopeless loyalty 
to an ideal. I assisted another so long in a fruitless 
attempt to reach Mecklenburg-Schwerin, that at last we 
grinned in each other's faces when we met, like a couple 
of augurs. He was possessed by this harmless mania 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 59 

as some are by the Xorth Pole, and I shall never forget 
his look of regretful compassion (as for one who was 
sacrificing his higher life to the fleshpots of Egypt) when 
I at last advised him somewhat strenuously to go to the 

D , whither the road was so much travelled that he 

could not miss it. General Banks, in his noble zeal for 
the honor of his country, would confer on the Secretary 
of State the power of imprisoning, in case of war, all 
these seekers of the unattainable, thus by a stroke of 
the pen annihilating the single poetic element in our 
humdrum life. Alas ! not everybody has the genius to 
be a Bobbin-Boy, or doubtless all these also would have 
chosen that more prosperous line of. life ! But moralists, 
sociologists, political economists, and taxes have slowly 
convinced me that my beggarly sympathies were a sin 
against society. Especially was the Buckle doctrine of 
averages (so nattering to our free-will) persuasive with 
me ; for as there must be in every year a certain num- 
ber who would bestow an alms on these abridged edi- 
tions of the Wandering Jew, the withdrawal of my quota 
could make no possible difference, since some destined 
proxy must always step forward to fill my gap. Just 
so many misdirected letters every year and no more ! 
Would it were as easy to reckon up the number of men 
on whose backs fate has written the wrong address, so 
that they arrive by mistake in Congress and other places 
w^here they do not belong ! May not these wanderers 
of whom I speak have been sent into the world without 
any proper address at alii Where is our Dead-Letter 
Office for such? And if wiser social arrangements 
should furnish us with something of the sort, fancy 
(horrible thought !) how many a workingman's friend 
(a kind of industry in which the labor is light and the 
wages heavy) would be sent thither because not called 
for in the office where he at present lies ! 



60 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

But I am leaving my new acquaintance too long under 
the lamp-post. The same Gano which had betrayed me 
to him revealed to me a well-set young man of about 
half my own age, as well dressed, so far as I could see, 
as I was, and with every natural qualification for getting 
his own livelihood as good, if not better, than my own. 
He had been reduced to the painful necessity of calling 
upon me by a series of crosses beginning with the Baden 
Revolution (for which, I own, he seemed rather young, 
— but perhaps he referred to a kind of revolution prac- 
tised every season at Baden-Baden), continued by re- 
peated failures in business, for amounts which must 
convince me of his entire respectability, and ending with 
our Civil War. During the latter, he had served with 
distinction as a soldier, taking a main part in every im- 
portant battle, with a rapid list of which he favored me, 
and no doubt would have admitted that, impartial as 
Jonathan Wild's great ancestor, he had been on both 
sides, had I baited him with a few hints of conservative 
opinions on a subject so distressing to a gentleman wish- 
ing to profit by one's sympathy and unhappily doubtful 
as to which way it might lean. For all these reasons, 
and, as he seemed to imply, for his merit in consenting 
to be born in Germany, he considered himself my natural 
creditor to the extent of five dollars, which he would 
handsomely consent to accept in greenbacks, though he 
preferred specie. The offer was certainly a generous 
one, and the claim presented with an assurance that 
carried conviction. But, unhappily, I had been led to 
remark a curious natural phenomenon. If I was ever 
weak enough to give anything to a petitioner of what- 
ever nationality, it always rained decayed compatriots 
of his for a month after. Post hoc ergo propter hoc may 
not be always safe logic, but here [_seemed to perceive a 
natural connection of cause and effect. Now, a few days 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 61 

before I had been so tickled with a paper (professedly 
written by a benevolent American clergyman) certifying 
that the bearer, a hard-working German, had long 
" sofered with rheumatic paints in his limps," that, after 
copying the passage into my note-book, I thought it but 
fair to pay a trifling honorarium to the author. I had 
pulled the string of the shower-bath ! It had been run- 
ning shipwrecked sailors for some time, but forthwith it 
began to pour Teutons, redolent of lager-bier. I could 
not help associating the apparition of my new friend 
with this series of otherwise unaccountable phenomena. 
I accordingly made up my mind to deny the debt, and 
modestly did so, pleading a native bias towards impecu- 
niosity to the full as strong as his own. He took a high 
tone with me at once, such as an honest man would 
naturally take w T ith a confessed repudiator. He even 
brought down his proud stomach so far as to join him- 
self to me for the rest of my townward walk, that he 
might give me his views of the American people, and 
thus inclusively of myself. 

I know not whether it is because I am pigeon-livered 
and lack gall, or whether it is from an overmastering 
sense of drollery, but I am apt to submit to such bast- 
ings with a patience which afterwards surprises me, 
being not without my share of warmth in the blood. 
Perhaps it is because I so often meet with young per- 
sons who know vastly more than I do, and especially with 
so many foreigners whose knowledge of this country is 
superior to my own. However it may be, I listened for 
some time with tolerable composure as my self-appointed 
lecturer gave me in detail his opinions of my country 
and its people. America, he informed me, was without 
arts, science, literature, culture, or any native hope of 
supplying them. We were a people wholly given to 
money-getting, and w r ho, having got it, knew no other 



62 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

use for it than to hold it fast. I am fain to confess that 
I felt a sensible itching of the biceps, and that my fingers 
closed with such a grip as he had just informed me was 
one of the effects of our unhappy climate. But happen- 
ing just then to be where I could avoid temptation by 
dodging down a by-street, I hastily left him to finish his 
diatribe to the lamp-post, which could stand it better 
than I. That young man will never know how near 
he came to being assaulted by a respectable gentleman 
of middle age, at the corner of Church Street. I have 
never felt quite satisfied that I did all my duty by him 
in not knocking him down. But perhaps he might have 
knocked me down, and then 1 

The capacity of indignation makes an essential part 
of the outfit of every honest man, but I am inclined to 
doubt whether he is a wise one who allows himself to act 
upon its first hints. It should be rather, I suspect, a 
latent heat in the blood, which makes itself felt in 
character, a steady reserve for the brain, warming the 
ovum of thought to life, rather than cooking it by a too 
hasty enthusiasm in reaching the boiling-point. As my 
pulse gradually fell back to its normal beat, I reflected 
that I had been uncomfortably near making a fool of 
myself, — a handy salve of euphuism for our vanity, 
though it does not always make a just allowance to 
Nature for her share in the business. What possible 
claim had my Teutonic friend to rob me of my compo- 
sure'? I am not, I think, specially thin-skinned as to 
other people's opinions of myself, having, as I conceive, 
later and fuller intelligence on that point than anybody 
else can give me. Life is continually weighing us in 
very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us pre- 
cisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust. 
Whoever at fifty does not rate himself quite as low as 
most of his acquaintance would be likely to put him, 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 63 

must be either a fool or a great man, and I humbly dis- 
claim being either. But if I was not smarting in per- 
son from any scattering shot of my late companion's 
commination, why should I grow hot at any implication 
of my country therein 1 Surely her shoulders are broad 
enough, if yours or mine are not, to bear up nnder a 
considerable avalanche of this kind. It is the bit of 
truth in every slander, the hint of likeness in every 
caricature, that makes us smart. " Art thou there, old 
Truepenny?" How did your blade know its way so 
well to that one loose rivet in our armor 1 I wondered 
whether Americans were over-sensitive in this respect, 
whether they were more touchy than other folks. On 
the whole, I thought we were not. Plutarch, who at least 
had studied philosophy, if he had not mastered it, could 
not stomach something Herodotus had said of Bceotia, 
and devoted an essay to showing up the delightful old 
traveller's malice and ill-breeding. French editors leave 
out of Montaigne's " Travels " some remarks of his about 
France, for reasons best known to themselves. Pachy- 
dermatous Deutschland, covered with trophies from 
every field of letters, still winces under that question 
which Pere Bouhours put two centuries ago, Si un Alle- 
mand peut etre hel-esprit ? John Bull grew apoplectic 
with angry amazement at the audacious persiflage of 
Piickler-Muskau. To be sure, he was a prince, — but 
that was not all of it, for a chance phrase of gentle 
Hawthorne sent a spasm through all the journals of 
England. Then this tenderness is not peculiar to us ? 
Console yourself, dear man and brother,* whatever you 
n^ay be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are 
dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a 
much greater genius for sameness than for originality, 
or the world would be at a sad pass shortly. The sur- 
prising thing is that men have such a taste for this 



64 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

somewhat musty flavor, that an Englishman, for exam- 
ple, should feel himself defrauded, nay, even outraged, 
when he comes over here and finds a people speaking 
what he admits to be something like English, and yet 
so very different from (or, as he w r ould say, to) those 
he left at home. Nothing, I am sure, equals my thank- 
fulness when I meet an Englishman who is not like 
every other, or, I may add, an American of the same 
odd turn. 

Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be 
as nice about his country as about his sweetheart, and 
who ever heard even the friendliest appreciation of that 
unexpressive she that did not seem to fall infinitely 
short ? Yet it would hardly be wise to hold every one 
an enemy who could not see her with ©ur own enchanted 
eyes. It seems to be the common opinion of foreigners 
that Americans are too tender upon this point. Per- 
haps 5 we are ; and if so, there must be a reason for it. 
Have we had fair play 1 Could the eyes of what is 
called Good Society (though it is so seldom true either to 
the adjective or noun) look upon a nation of. democrats 
with any chance of receiving an undistorted image *? 
Were not those, moreover, who found in the old order 
of things an earthly paradise, paying them quarterly 
dividends for the wisdom of their ancestors, with the 
punctuality of the seasons, unconsciously bribed to mis- 
understand if not to misrepresent us 1 Whether at war 
or at peace, there we were, a standing menace to all 
earthly paradises of that kind, fatal underminers of the 
very credit on which the dividends were based, all the 
more hateful and terrible that our destructive agency wa^ 
so insidious, working invisible in the elements, as it 
seemed, active while they slept, and coming upon them in 
the darkness like an armed man. Could Laius have the 
proper feelings of a father towards CEdipus, announced 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 65 

as his destined destroyer by infallible oracles, and felt to 
be such by every conscious fibre of his soul 1 For more 
than a century the Dutch were the laughing-stock of 
polite Europe. They were butter-firkins, swillers of beer 
and schnaps, and their vrouws from whom Holbein painted 
the ail-but loveliest of Madonnas, Rembrandt the grace- 
ful girl who sits immortal on his knee in Dresden, and 
Rubens his abounding goddesses, were the synonymes 
of clumsy vulgarity. Even so late as Irving the ships 
of the greatest navigators in the world were represented 
as sailing equally well stern-foremost. That the aristo- 
cratic Venetians should have 

" Riveted with gigantic piles 
Thorough the centre their new-catch ed miles," • 

was heroic. But the far more marvellous achievement 
of the Dutch in the same kind was ludicrous even to re- 
publican Marvell. Meanwhile, during that very century 
of scorn, they were the best artists, sailors, merchants, 
bankers, printers, scholars, jurisconsults, and statesmen 
in Europe, and the genius of Motley has revealed them 
to us, earning". a right to themselves by the most heroic 
struggle in human annals. But, alas ! they were not 
merely simple burghers who had fairly made themselves 
High Mightinesses, and could treat on equal terms with 
anointed kings, but their commonwealth carried in its 
bosom the germs of democracy. They even unmuzzled, 
at least after dark, that dreadful mastiff, the Press, 
whose scent is, or ought to be, so keen for wolves in 
sheep's clothing and for certain other animals in lions' 
skins. They made fun of Sacred Majesty, and, what was 
worse, managed uncommonly well without it. In an 
age when periwigs made so large a part of the natural 
dignity of man, people with such a turn of mind were 
dangerous. How could they seem other than vulgar and 
hateful ] 

E 



66 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

In the natural course of things we succeeded to this 
unenviable position of general butt. The Dutch had 
thriven under it pretty well, and there was hope that we 
could at least contrive to worry along. And we certainly 
did in a very redoubtable fashion. Perhaps we deserved 
some of the sarcasm more than our Dutch predecessors 
in office. We had nothing to boast of in arts or letters, 
and were given to bragging overmuch of our merely ma- 
terial prosperity, due quite as much to the virtue of our 
continent as to our own. There was some truth in Car- 
lyle's sneer, after all. Till we had succeeded in some 
higher way than this, we had only the success of physical 
growth. Our greatness, like that of enormous Russia, 
was greatness on the map, — barbarian mass only ; but 
had we gone down, like that other Atlantis, in some vast 
cataclysm, we should have covered but a pin's point on 
the chart of memory, compared with those ideal spaces 
occupied by tiny Attica and cramped England. At the 
same time, our critics somewhat too easily forgot that 
material must make ready the foundation for ideal tri- 
umphs, that the arts have no chance in poor countries. 
But it must be allowed that democracy stood for a great 
deal in our shortcoming. The Edinburgh Review never 
would have thought of asking, " Who reads a Russian 
book 1 " and England was satisfied with iron from Sweden 
without being impertinently inquisitive after her painters 
and statuaries. Was it that they expected too much 
from the mere miracle of Freedom % Is it not the highest 
art of a Republic to make men of flesh and blood, and 
not the marble ideals of such 1 It may be fairly doubted 
whether we have produced this higher type of man yet. 
Perhaps it is the collective, not the individual, humanity 
that is to have a chance of nobler development among 
us. We shall see. We have a vast amount of imported 
ignorance, and, still worse, of native ready-made knowl- 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 67 

edge, to digest before even the preliminaries of such a 
consummation can be arranged. We have got to learn 
that statesmanship is the most complicated of all arts, 
and to come back to the apprenticeship-system too hastily 
abandoned. At present, we trust a man with making 
constitutions on less proof of competence than we should 
demand before we gave him our shoe to patch. We have 
nearly reached the limit of the reaction from the old 
notion, which paid too much regard to birth and station 
as qualifications for office, and have touched the extreme 
point in the opposite direction, putting the highest of 
human functions up at auction to be bid for by any 
creature capable of going upright on two legs. In some 
places, we have arrived at a point at which civil society 
is no longer possible, and already another reaction has 
begun, not backwards to the old system, but towards fit- 
ness either from natural aptitude or special training. 
But will it always be safe to let evils work their own 
cure by becoming unendurable 1 Every one of them 
leaves its taint in the constitution of the body-politic, 
each in itself, perhaps, trifling, yet all together powerful 
for evil. 

But whatever we might do or leave undone, we were 
not genteel, and it was uncomfortable to be continually 
reminded that, though we should boast that we were the 
Great West till we were black in the face, it did not bring 
us an inch nearer to the world's West-End. That sacred 
enclosure of respectability was tabooed to us. The Holy 
Alliance did not inscribe us on its visiting-list. The Old 
World of wigs and orders and liveries would shop with 
us, but we must ring at the area-bell, and not venture to 
awaken the more august clamors of the knocker. Our 
manners, it must be granted, had none of those graces 
that stamp the caste of Vere de Vere, in whatever mu- 
seum of British antiquities they may be hidden. In 
short, we were vulgar. 



68 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

This was one of those horribly vague accusations, the 
victim of which has no defence. An umbrella is of no 
avail against a Scotch mist. It envelops you, it pene- 
trates at every pore, it wets you through without seem- 
ing to wet you at all. Vulgarity is an eighth deadly sin, 
added to the list in these latter days, and worse than all 
the others put together, since it perils your salvation in 
this world, — far the more important of the two in the 
minds of most men. It profits nothing to draw nice dis- 
tinctions between essential and conventional, for the con- 
vention in this case is the essence, and you may break 
every command of the decalogue with perfect good-breed- 
ing, nay, if you are adroit, without losing caste. We, 
indeed, had it not to lose, for we had never gained it. 
" How am I vulgar 1 " asks the culprit, shudderingly. 
" Because thou art not like unto Us," answers Lucifer, 
Son of the Morning, and there is no more to be said. 
The god of this world may be a fallen angel, but he has 
us there ! We were as clean, — so far as my observation 
goes, I think we were cleaner, morally and physically, 
than the English, and therefore, of course, than every- 
body else. But we did not pronounce the diphthong ou 
as they did, and we said eether and not eyther, following 
therein the fashion of our ancestors, who unhappily could 
bring over no English better than Shakespeare's ; and we 
did not stammer as they had learned to do from the 
courtiers, who in this way nattered the Hanoverian king, 
a foreigner among the people he had come to reign over. 
Worse than all, we might have the noblest ideas and 
the finest sentiments in the world, but we vented them 
through that organ by which men are led rather than 
leaders, though some physiologists would persuade us 
that Nature furnishes her captains with a fine handle to 
their faces that Opportunity may get a good purchase on 
them for dragging them to the front. 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 69 

This state of things was so painful that excellent 
people were not wanting who gave their whole genius to 
reproducing here the original Bull, whether by gaiters, 
the cut of their whiskers, by a factitious brutality in their 
tone, or by an accent that was forever tripping and fall- 
ing flat over the tangled roots of our common tongue. 
Martyrs to a false ideal, it never occurred to them that 
nothing is more hateful to gods and men than a second- 
rate Englishman, and for the very reason that this planet 
never produced a more splendid creature than the first- 
rate one, witness Shakespeare and the Indian Mutiny. 
Witness that truly sublime self-abnegation of those pris- 
oners lately among the bandits of Greece, where average 
men gave an example of quiet fortitude for which all 
the stoicism of antiquity can show no match. If we 
could contrive to be not too unobtrusively our simple 
selves, we should be the most delightful of human be- 
ings, and the most original ; whereas, when the plating 
of Anglicism rubs off, as it always will in points that 
come to much wear, we are liable to very unpleasing 
conjectures about the quality of the metal underneath. 
Perhaps one reason why the average Briton spreads him- 
self here with such an easy air of superiority may be 
owing to the fact that he meets with so many bad imi- 
tations as to conclude himself the only real thing in a 
wilderness of shams. He fancies himself moving through 
an endless Bloomsbury, where his mere apparition con- 
fers honor as an avatar of the court-end of the universe. 
Not a Bull of them all but is persuaded he bears Europa 
upon his back. This is the sort of fellow whose patron- 
age is so divertingly insufferable. Thank Heaven he is 
not the only specimen of cater-cousinship from the dear 
old Mother Island that is shown to us ! Among genuine 
things, I know nothing more genuine than the better 
men whose limbs were made in England. So manly- 



70 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

tender, so brave, so true, so warranted to wear, they 
make us proud to feel that blood is thicker than water. 

But it is not merely the Englishman ; every European 
candidly admits in himself some right of primogeniture 
in respect to us, and pats this shaggy continent on the 
back with a lively sense of generous unbending. The 
German who plays the bass-viol has a well-founded con- 
tempt, which he is not always nice in concealing, for a 
country so few of whose children ever take that noble 
instrument between their knees. His cousin, the Ph. 
D. from Gottingen, cannot help despising a people who 
do not grow loud and red over Aryans and Turanians, 
and are indifferent about their descent from either. The 
Frenchman feels an easy mastery in speaking his mother 
tongue, and attributes it to some native superiority of 
parts that lifts him high above us barbarians of the 
West.. The Italian prima donna sweeps a courtesy of 
careless pity to the over-facile pit which unsexes her 
with the bravo ! innocently meant to show a familiarity 
with foreign usage. But all without exception make no 
secret of regarding us as the goose bound to deliver 
them a golden egg in return for their cackle. Such 
men as Agassiz, Guyot, and Goldwin Smith come with 
gifts in their hands ; but since it is commonly European 
failures who bring hither their remarkable gifts and 
acquitments, this view of the case is sometimes just 
the l^ast bit in the world provoking. To think what a 
dciicious seclusion of contempt we enjoyed till Califor- 
nia and our own ostentatious parvenus, flinging gold 
I way in Europe that might have endowed libraries at 
home, gave us the ill repute of riches ! What a shabby 
downfall from the Arcadia which the French officers of 
our Revolutionary War fancied they saw here through 
Rousseau-tinted spectacles ! Something of Arcadia there 
really was, something of the Old Age ; and that divine 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 71 

provincialism were cheaply repurchased could we have 
it back again in exchange for the tawdry upholstery 
that has taken its place. 

For some reason or other, the European has rarely 
been able to see America except in caricature. Would 
the first Review of the world have printed the niaiseries 
of Mr. Maurice Sand as a picture of society in any civil- 
ized country 1 Mr. Sand, to be sure, has inherited 
nothing of his famous mother's literary outfit, except 
the pseudonyme. But since the conductors of the 
Revue could not have published his story because it was 
clever, they must have thought it valuable for its truth. 
As true as the last-century Englishman's picture of 
Jean Crapaud ! We do not ask to be sprinkled with 
rosewater, but may perhaps fairly protest against being 
drenched with the rinsings of an unclean imagination. 
The next time the Revue allows such ill-bred persons to 
throw their slops out of its first-floor windows, let it 
honestly preface the discharge with a gave de Veau ! that 
we may run from under in season. And Mr. Duvergier 
d'Hauranne, who knows how to be entertaining ! I 
know le Frangais est plidot indiscret que confiant, and the 
pen slides too easily when indiscretions will fetch so 
much a page ; but should we not have been tant-soit-peu 
more cautious had we been writing about people on the 
other side of the Channel 1 But then it is a fact in the 
natural history of the American long familiar to Euro- 
peans, that he abhors privacy, knows not the meaning 
of reserve, lives in hotels because of their greater pub- 
licity, and is never so pleased as when his domestic 
affairs (if he may be said to have any) are paraded in 
the newspapers. Barnum, it is well known, represents 
perfectly the average national sentiment in this respect. 
However it be, we are not treated like other people, or 
perhaps I should say like people who are ever likely to 
be met with in society. 



?2 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

Is it in the climate 1 Either I have a false notion of 
European manners, or else the atmosphere affects them 
strangely when exported hither. Perhaps they suffer 
from the sea-voyage like some of the more delicate 
wines. During our Civil War an English gentleman of 
the highest description was kind enough to call upon 
me, mainly, as it seemed, to inform me how entirely 
he sympathized with the Confederates, and how sure he 
felt that we could never subdue them, — " they were 
the gentlemen of the country, you know." Another, the 
first greetings hardly over, asked me how I accounted 
for the universal meagreness of my countrymen. To a 
thinner man than I, or from a stouter man than he, the 
question might have been offensive. The Marquis of 
Hartington * wore a secession badge at a public ball in 
New York. In a civilized country he might have been 
roughly handled ; but here, w T here the bienseances are 
not so well understood, of course nobody minded it. A 
French traveller told me he had been a good deal in the 
British colonies, and had been astonished to see how 
soon the people became Americanized. He added, w T ith 
delightful bonhomie, and as if he were sure it w r ould 
charm me, that " they even began to talk through their 
noses, just like you ! " I wtis naturally ravished with 
this testimony to the assimilating power of democracy, 
and could only reply that I hoped they would never 
adopt our democratic patent-method of seeming to settle 
one's honest debts, for they would find it paying through 
the nose in the long-run. I am a man of the New 

* One of Mr. Lincoln's neatest strokes of humor was his treatment 
of this gentleman when a laudable curiosity induced him to be pre- 
sented to the President of the Broken Bubble. Mr. Lincoln persisted 
in calling him Mr. Partington. Surely the refinement of good-breed- 
ing could go no further. Giving the young man his real name (already 
notorious in the newspapers) would have made his visit an insult. 
Had Henri IV. done this, it would have been famous. 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 73 

World, and do not know precisely the present fashion of 
May-Fair, but I have a kind of feeling that if an Ameri- 
can (mutato nomine, de te is always frightfully possible) 
were to do this kind of thing under a European roof, it 
would induce some disagreeable reflections as to the 
ethical results of democracy. I read the other day in 
print the remark of a British tourist who had eaten 
large quantities of our salt, such as it is (I grant it has 
not the European savor), that the Americans were 
hospitable, no doubt, but that it was partly because they 
longed for foreign visitors to relieve the tedium of their 
dead-level existence, and partly from ostentation. What 
shall we do? Shall we close our doors'? Not I, for one, 
if I should so have forfeited the friendship of L. ' S., 
most lovable of men. He somehow seems to find us 
human, at least, and so did Clough, whose poetry will 
one of these days, perhaps, be found to have been the 
best utterance in verse of this generation. And T. H. 
the mere grasp of whose manly hand carries with it the 
pledge of frankness and friendship, of an abiding sim- 
plicity of nature as affecting as it is rare ! 

The fine old Tory aversion of former times was not 
hard to bear. There was something even refreshing in 
it, as in a northeaster to a hardy temperament. When 
a British parson, travelling in Newfoundland while the 
slash of our separation was still raw, after prophesying a 
glorious future for an island that continued to dry its 
fish under the segis of Saint George, glances disdainfully 
over his spectacles in parting at the U. S. A., and fore- 
bodes for them a " speedy relapse into barbarism," now 
that they have madly cut themselves off from the 
humanizing influences of Britain, I smile with barbarian 
self-conceit. But this kind of thing became by degrees 
an unpleasant anachronism. For meanwhile the young 
giant was growing, was beginning indeed to feel tight in 
4 



74 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 

his clothes, was obliged to let in a gore here and there 
in Texas, in California, in New Mexico, in Alaska, and 
had the scissors and needle and thread ready for Can- 
ada when the time came. His shadow loomed like a 
Brocken-spectre over against Europe, — the shadow of 
what they were coming toj that was the unpleasant part 
of it. Even in such misty image as they had of him, it 
was painfully evident that his clothes were not of any 
cut hitherto fashionable, nor conceivable by a Bond 
Street tailor, — and this in an age, too, when everything 
depends upon clothes, when, if we do not keep up ap- 
pearances, the seeming-solid frame of this universe, nay, 
your very God, would slump into himself, like, a mockery 
king of snow, being nothing, after all, but a prevailing 
mode. From this moment the young giant assumed the 
respectable aspect of a phenomenon, to be got rid of if 
possible, but at any rate as legitimate a subject of human 
study as the glacial period or the silurian what-d'ye-call- 
ems. If the man of the primeval drift-heaps is so ab- 
sorbingly interesting, why not the man of the drift that 
is just beginning, of the drift into whose irresistible cur- 
rent we are just being sucked whether we will or no 1 If 
I were in their place, I confess I should not be fright- 
ened. Man has survived so much, and contrived to be 
comfortable on this planet after surviving so much ! I 
am something of a protestant in matters of government 
also, and am willing to get rid of vestments and cere- 
monies and to come down to bare benches, if only faith 
in God take the place of a general agreement to profess 
confidence in ritual and sham. Every mortal man of us 
holds stock in the only public debt that is absolutely 
sure of payment, and that is the debt of the Maker of 
this Universe to the Universe he has made. I have no 
notion of selling out my stock in a panic. 

It was something to have advanced even to the dignity 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 75 

of a phenomenon, and yet I do not know that the rela- 
tion of the individual American to the individual Euro- 
pean was bettered by it ; and that, after all, must adjust 
itself comfortably before there can be a right under- 
standing between the two. We had been a desert, we 
became a museum. People came hither for scientific 
and not social ends. The very cockney could not com- 
plete his education without taking a vacant stare at us 
in passing. But the sociologists (I think they call them- 
selves so) were the hardest to bear. There was no es- 
cape. I have even known a professor of this fearful 
science to come disguised in petticoats. We were cross- 
examined as a chemist cross-examines a new substance. 
Human ] yes, all the elements are present, though ab- 
normally combined. Civilized 1 Hm ! that needs a 
stricter assay. No entomologist could take a more 
friendly interest in a strange bug. After a few such ex- 
periences, I, for one, have felt as if I were merely one of 
those horrid things preserved in spirits (and very bad 
spirits, too) in a cabinet. I was not the fellow-being of 
these explorers : I was a curiosity ; I was a specimen. 
Hath not an American organs, dimensions, senses, affec- 
tions, passions even as a European hath ? If you prick 
us, do we not bleed 1 If you tickle us, do we not laugh % 
I will not keep on with Shylock to his next question but 
one. 

Till after our Civil War it never seemed to enter the 
head of any foreigner, especially of any Englishman, that 
an American had what could be called a country, except 
as a place to eat, sleep, and trade in. Then it seemed to 
strike them suddenly. "By Jove, you know, fellahs 
don't fight like that for a shop-till ! " No, I rather think 
not. To Americans America is something more than a 
promise and an expectation. It has a past and tradi- 
tions of its own. A descent from men who sacrificed 



76 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNER' 

everything and came hither, not to better their fortm.. 
but to plant their idea in virgin soil, should be a good 
pedigree. There was never colony save this that went 
forth, not to seek gold, but God. Is it not as well to 
have sprung from such as these as from some burly 
beggar who came over with Wilhelmus Conquestor, un- 
less, indeed, a line grow better as it runs farther away 
from stalwart ancestors % And for history, it is dry 
enough, no doubt, in the books, but, for all that, is of a 
kind that tells in the blood. I have admitted that Car- 
lyle's sneer had a show of truth in it. But what does 
he himself, like a true Scot, admire in the Hohenzol- 
lerns] First of all, that they were canny, a thrifty, 
forehanded race. Next, that they made a good fight 
from generation to generation with the chaos around 
them. That is precisely the battle which the English 
race on this continent has been carrying doughtily on for 
two centuries and a half. Doughtily and silently, for 
you cannot hear in Europe " that crash, the death-song 
of the perfect tree," that has been going on here from 
sturdy father to sturdy son, and making this continent 
habitable for the weaker Old World breed that Jias 
swarmed to it during the last half-century. If ever men 
did a good stroke of work on this planet, it was the fore- 
fathers of those whom you are wondering whether it 
would not be prudent to acknowledge as far-off cousins. 
Alas, man of genius, to whom we owe so much, could 
you see nothing more than the burning of a foul chim- 
ney in that clash of Michael and Satan which flamed up 
under your very eyes 1 

Before our war we were to Europe but a huge mob of 
adventurers and shop-keepers. Leigh Hunt expressed it 
well enough when he said that he could never think of 
America without seeing a gigantic counter stretched all 
along the seaboard. Feudalism had by degrees made 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 77 

commerce, the great civilizer, contemptible. But a 
tradesman with sword on thigh and very prompt of 
stroke was not only redoubtable, he had become respect- 
able also. Few people, I suspect, alluded twice to a 
needle in Sir John Hawkwood's presence, after that 
doughty fighter had exchanged it for a more dangerous 
tool of the same metal. Democracy had been hitherto 
only a ludicrous effort to reverse the laws of nature by 
thrusting Cleon into the place of Pericles. But a democ- 
racy that could fight for an abstraction, whose members 
held life and goods cheap compared with that larger life 
which we call country, was not merely unheard-of, but 
portentous. It was the nightmare of the Old World 
taking upon itself flesh and blood, turning out to be 
substance and not dream. Since the Norman crusader 
clanged down upon the throne of the porjihyro-geniti, 
carefully-draped appearances had never received such a 
shock, had never been so rudely called on to produce 
their titles to the empire of the world. Authority has 
had its periods not unlike those of geology, and at last 
comes Man claiming kingship in right of his mere man- 
hood. The world of the Saurians might be in some 
respects more picturesque, but the march of events is 
inexorable, and it is bygone. 

The young giant had certainly got out of long-clothes. 
He had become the enfant terrible of the human house- 
hold. It was not and will not be easy for the world 
(especially for our British cousins) to look upon us as 
grown up. The youngest of nations, its people must also 
be young and to be treated accordingly, was the syl- 
logism, — as if libraries did not make all nations equally 
old in all those respects, at least, where age is an ad- 
vantage and not a defect. Youth, no doubt, has its good 
qualities, as people feel who are losing it, but boyishness 
is another thing. We had been somewhat boyish as a 



78 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS, 

nation, a little loud, a little pushing, a little braggart. 
But might it not partly have been because we felt that 
we had certain claims to respect that were not admitted'? 
The war which established our position as a vigorous 
nationality has also sobered us. A nation, like a man, 
cannot look death in the eye for four years, without some 
strange reflections, without arriving at some clearer con- 
sciousness of the stuff it is made of, without some great 
moral change. Such a change, or the beginning of it, 
no observant person can fail to see here. Our thought 
and our politics, our bearing as a people, are assuming a 
manlier tone. We have been compelled to see what was 
weak in democracy as well as what was strong. We 
have begun obscurely to recognize that things do not go 
of themselves, and that popular government is not in 
itself a panacea, is no better than any other form except 
as the virtue and wisdom of the people make it so, and 
that when men undertake to do their own kingship, they 
enter upon the dangers and responsibilities as well as 
the privileges of the function. Above all, it looks as if 
we were on the way to be persuaded that no government 
can be carried on by declamation. It is noticeable also 
that facility of communication has made the best Eng- 
lish and French thought far more directly operative 
here than ever before. Without being Europeanized, 
our discussion of important questions in statesmanship, 
political economy, in aesthetics, is taking a broader scope 
and a higher tone. It had certainly been provincial, 
one might almost say local, to a very, unpleasant extent. 
Perhaps our experience in soldiership has taught us to 
value training more than we have been popularly wont. 
We may possibly come to the conclusion, one of these 
days, that self-made men may not be always equally 
skilful in the manufacture of wisdom, may not be 
divinely commissioned to fabricate the higher qualities 
of opinion on all possible topics of human interest. 



ON \ CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 79 

So long as we continue to be the most common- 
schooled and the least cultivated people in the world, I 
suppose we must consent to endure this condescending 
manner of foreigners toward us. The more friendly 
they mean to be the more ludicrously prominent it be- 
comes. They can never appreciate the immense amount 
of silent work that has been done here, making this 
continent slowly fit for the abode of man, and which 
will demonstrate itself, let us hope, in the character of 
the people. Outsiders can only be expected to judge a 
nation by the amount it has contributed to the civiliza- 
tion of the world ; the amount, that is, that can be seen 
and handled. A great place in history can only be 
achieved by competitive examinations, nay, by a long 
course of them. How much new thought have we con- 
tributed to the common stock 1 Till that question can 
be triumphantly answered, or needs no answer, we must 
continue to be simply interesting as an experiment, to 
be studied as a problem, and not respected as an at- 
tained result or an accomplished solution. Perhaps, as 
I have hinted, their patronizing manner toward us is the 
fair result of their failing to see here anything more than 
a poor imitation, a plaster-cast of Europe. And are 
they not partly right 1 If the tone of the uncultivated 
American has too often the arrogance of the barbarian, 
is not that of the cultivated as often vulgarly apologetic ] 
In the America they meet with is there the simplicity, 
the manliness, the absence of sham, the sincere human 
nature, the sensitiveness to duty and implied obligation, 
that in any way distinguishes us from what our orators 
call "the" effete civilization of the Old World"] Is 
there a politician among us daring enough (except a 
Dana here and there) to risk his future on the chance 
of our keeping our word with the exactness of super- 
stitious communities like England 1 Is it certain that 



80 ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS, 

we shall be ashamed of a bankruptcy of honor, if we 
can only keep the letter of our bond 1 I hope we shall 
be able to answer all these questions with a frank yes. 
At any rate, we would advise our visitors that we are 
not merely curious creatures, but belong to the family 
of man, and that, as individuals, we are not to be al- 
ways subjected to the competitive examination above 
mentioned, even if we acknowledged their competence 
as an examining board. Above all, we beg them to re- 
member that America is not to us, as to them, a mere 
object of external interest to be discussed and analyzed, 
but in us, part of our very marrow. Let them not sup- 
pose that we conceive of ourselves as exiles from the 
graces and amenities of an older date than we, though 
very much at home in a state of things not yet all it 
might be or should be, but which we mean to make so, 
and which we find both wholesome and pleasant for men 
(though perhaps not for dilettanti) to live in. " The full 
tide of human existence " may be felt here as keenly as 
Johnson felt it at Charing Cross, and in a larger sense. 
I know one person w T ho is singular enough to think 
Cambridge the very best spot on the habitable globe. 
" Doubtless God cmild have made a better, but doubtless 
he never did." 

It will take England a great while to get over her airs 
of patronage toward us, or even passably to conceal 
them. She cannot help confounding the people with the 
country, and regarding us as lusty juveniles. She has a 
conviction that whatever good there is in us is wholly 
English, when the truth is that we are worth nothing ex- 
cept so far as we have disinfected ourselves of Anglicism. 
She is especially condescending just now, and lavishes 
sugar-plums on us as if we had not outgrown them. I 
am no believer in sudden conversions, especially in sud- 
den conversions to a favorable opinion of people who 



ON A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOREIGNERS. 81 

have just proved you to be mistaken in judgment and 
therefore unwise in policy. I never blamed ber for not 
wishing well to democracy, — how should she 1 — but 
Alabamas are not wishes. Let her not be too hasty in 
believing Mr. Reverdy Johnson's pleasant words. Though 
there is no thoughtful man in America who would not 
consider a war with England the greatest of calamities, 
3~et the feeling towards her here is very far from cordial, 
whatever our Minister may say in the effusion that 
comes after ample dining. Mr. Adams, with his famous 
" My Lord, this means war," perfectly represented his 
country. Justly or not, we have a feeling that we have 
been wronged, not merely insulted. The only sure way 
of bringing about a healthy relation between the two 
countries is for Englishmen to clear their minds of the 
notion that we are always to be treated as a kind of 
inferior and deported Englishman whose nature they 
perfectly understand, and whose back they accordingly 
stroke the wrong way of the fur with amazing persever- 
ance. Let them learn to treat us naturally on our 
merits as human beings, as they would a German or a 
Frenchman, and not as if we were a kind of counterfeit 
Briton whose crime appeared in every shade of difference, 
and before long there would come that right feeling 
which we naturally call a good understanding. The 
common blood, and still more the common language, are 
fatal instruments of misapprehension. Let them give 
up trying to understand us, still more thinking that 
they do, and acting in various absurd ways as the 
necessary consequence, for they will never arrive at that 
devoutly-to-be-wished consummation, till they learn to 
look at us as we are and not as they suppose us to be. 
Dear old long-estranged mother-in-law, it is a great many 
years since we parted. Since 1660, when you married 
again, you have been a step-mother to us. Put on your 



82 OX A CERTAIN CONDESCENSION IN FOEEIGNEES. 

spectacles, dear madam. Yes, we have grown, and 
changed likewise. You would not let us darken your 
doors, if you could help it. We know that perfectly 
well. But pray, when we look to be treated as men, 
don't shake that rattle in our faces, nor talk baby to us 
any longer. 

*' Do, child, go to it gran dam, child; 

Give grandam kingdom, and it grandam will 

Give it a plum, a cherry, and a fig! " 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER.* 



IT is the misfortune of American biography that it 
must needs be more or less provincial, and that, 
contrary to what might have been predicted, this qual- 
ity in it predominates in proportion as the country 
grows larger. Wanting any great and acknowledged 
centre of national life and thought, our expansion has 
hitherto been rather aggregation than growth ; reputa- 
tions must be hammered out thin to cover so wide a 
surface, and the substance of most hardly holds out to 
the boundaries of a single State. Our very history 
wants unity, and down to the Revolution the attention 
is wearied and confused by having to divide itself among 
thirteen parallel threads, instead of being concentred 
on a single clew. A sense of remoteness and seclusion 
comes over us as we read, and we cannot help asking 
ourselves, " Were not these things done in a corner 1 " 
Notoriety may be achieved in a narrow sphere, but 
fame demands for its evidence a more distant and pro- 
longed reverberation. To the world at large we were 
but a short column of figures in the corner of a blue- 
book, New England exporting so much salt-fish, timber, 
and Medford rum, Virginia so many hogsheads of tobac- 
co, and buying with the proceeds a certain amount of 
English manufactures. The story of our early coloniza- 
tion had a certain moral interest, to be sure, but was 
altogether inferior in picturesque fascination to that of 

* The Life of Josiah Quincy by his„son. 



84 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of 

our nation, are bare of those foregone and far-reaching 

associations with names, the divining-rods of fancy, which 

the soldiers and civilians of the Old World get for 

nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians 

and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as 

well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of 

glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the 

sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs 

of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace 

in saying, 

" Avia Pierichim peragro loca irallius ante 
Trita solo " ; 

but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece 
and Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with in- 
voking a goddess from whom legend derived the planter 
of his race. His eyes looked out on a landscape satu- 
rated with glorious recollections ; he had seen Caesar, 
and heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus 
or Cato Four Corners, — with Israel Putnam or Return 
Jonathan Meigs 1 We have been transplanted, and for 
us the long hierarchical succession of history is broken. 
The Past has not kid its venerable hands upon us in 
consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence 
whose force is in its continuity. We are to Europe as 
the Church of England to her of Rome. The latter old 
lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten 
horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers 
that vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet every- 
where, whose revenues are none the less fruitful for 
being levied on the imagination. We may claim that 
England's history is also ours, but it is e. de jure, and not 
a de facto property that we have in it, — something that 
may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satis- 
faction, and does not savor of the realty. Have we not 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. S5 

seen the mockery crown and sceptre of the exiled Stuarts 
in St. Peter's 1 ? the medal struck so lately as 1784 with 
its legend, Hen IX Mag Brit et Hib Rex, whose con- 
tractions but faintly typify the scantness of the fact 1 

As the novelist complains that jur society wants that 
sharp contrast of character and costume which comes of 
caste, so in the narrative of our historians we miss what 
may be called background and perspective, as if the 
events and the actors in them failed of that cumulative 
interest which only a long historical entail can give. Rel- 
atively, the crusade of Sir William Pepperell was of more 
consequence than that of St. Louis, and yet forgive us, 
injured shade of the second American baronet, if we find 
the narrative of Joinville more interesting than your de- 
spatches to Governor Shirley. Relatively, the insurrec- 
tion of that Daniel whose Irish patronymic Shea was 
euphonized into Shays, as a set-off for the debasing of 
French chaise into shay, was more dangerous than that 
of Charles Edward ; but for some reason or other (as vice 
sometimes has the advantage of virtue) the latter is more 
enticing to the imagination, and the least authentic relic 
of it in song or story has a relish denied to the painful 
industry of Minot. Our events seem to fall short of that 
colossal proportion which befits the monumental style. 
Look grave as we will, there is something ludicrous in 
Counsellor Keane's pig being the pivot of a revolution. 
We are of yesterday, and it is to no purpose that our 
political augurs divine from the flight of our eagles that 
to-morrow shall be ours, and flatter us with an all-hail 
hereafter. Things do really gain in greatness by being 
acted on a great and cosmopolitan stage, because there 
is inspiration in the thronged audience, and the nearer 
match that puts men on their mettle. Webster was 
more largely endowed by nature than Fox, and Fisher 
Ames not much below Burke as a talker ; but what a 



86 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

difference in the intellectual training, in the literary cul- 
ture and associations, in- the whole social outfit, of the 
men who were their antagonists and companions ! It 
should seem that, if it be collision with other minds and 
with events that strikes or draws the fire from a man, then 
the quality of those might have something to do with 
the quality of the fire, — whether it shall be culinary or 
electric. We have never known the varied stimulus, the 
inexorable criticism, the many-sided opportunity of a 
great metropolis, the inspiring reinforcement of an un- 
divided national consciousness. In everything but trade 
we have missed the invigoration of foreign rivalry. We 
may prove that we are this and that and the other, — - 
our Fourth-of-July orators have proved it time and again, 
— the census has proved it ; but the Muses are women, 
and have no great fancy for statistics, though easily 
silenced by them. W^e are great, we are rich, we are all 
kinds of good things ; but did it never occur to you that 
somehow we are not interesting, except as a phenomenon 1 
It may safely be affirmed that for one cultivated man in 
this country who studies American, there are fifty who 
study European history, ancient or modern. 

Till within a year or two we have been as distant and 
obscure to the eyes of Europe as Ecuador to our own. 
Every day brings us nearer, enables us to see the Old 
World more clearly, and by inevitable comparison to 
judge ourselves with some closer approach to our real 
value. This has its advantage so long as our culture is, 
as for a long time it must be, European ; for we shall be 
little better than apes and parrots till we are forced to 
measure our muscle with the trained and practised cham- 
pions of that elder civilization. We have at length es- 
tablished our claim to the noblesse of the sword, the first 
step still of every nation that would make its entry into 
the best society of history. To maintain ourselves there, 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 87 

we must achieve an equality in the more exclusive circle 
of culture, and to that end must submit ourselves to the 
European standard of intellectual weights and measures. 
That we have made the hitherto biggest gun might ex- 
cite apprehension (were there a dearth of iron), but can 
never exact respect. That our pianos and patent reapers 
have won medals does but confirm us in our mechanic 
and material measure of merit. We must contribute 
something more than mere contrivances for the saving 
of labor, which we have been only too ready to misapply 
in the domain of thought and the higher kinds of inven- 
tion. In those Olympic games where nations contend for 
truly immortal wreaths, it may well be questioned whether 
a mowing-machine would stand much chance in the 
chariot-races, — whether a piano, though made by a chev- 
alier, could compete successfully for the prize of music. 

We shall have to be content for a good while yet with 
our provincialism, and must strive to make the best of it. 
In it lies the germ of nationality, and that is, after all, 
the prime condition of all thorough-bred greatness of 
character. To this choicest fruit of a healthy life, well 
rooted in native soil, and drawing prosperous juices 
thence, nationality gives the keenest flavor. Mr. Lincoln 
was an original man, and in so far a great man ; yet it 
was the Americanism of his every thought, word, and act 
which not only made his influence equally at home in 
East and West, but drew the eyes of the outside world, 
and was the pedestal that lifted him where he could be 
seen by them. Lincoln showed that native force may 
transcend local boundaries, but the growth of such 
nationality is hindered and hampered by our division 
into so many half-independent communities, each with its 
objects of county Ambition, and its public men great to 
the borders of their district. In this way our standard 
of greatness is insensibly debased. To receive any na- 



88 A GEEAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

tional appointment, a man must have gone through pre- 
cisely the worst training for it ; he must have so far 
narrowed and belittled himself with State politics as to 
be acceptable at home. In this way a man may become 
chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, because 
he knows how to pack a caucus in Catawampus County, 
or be sent ambassador to Barataria, because he has drunk 
bad whiskey with every voter in Wildcat City. Should 
we ever attain to a conscious nationality, it will have the 
advantage of lessening the number of our great men, and 
widening our appreciation to the larger scale of the two 
or three that are left, — if there should be so many. 
Meanwhile we offer a premium to the production of great 
men in a small way, by inviting each State to set up the 
statues of two of its immortals in the Capitol. What a 
niggardly percentage ! Already we are embarrassed, not 
to find the two, but to choose among the crowd of candi- 
dates. Well, seventy-odd heroes in about as many years 
is pretty well for a young nation. We do not envy most 
of them their eternal martyrdom in marble, their pillory 
of indiscrimination. We fancy even native tourists paus- 
ing before the greater part of the effigies, and, after 
reading the names, asking desperately, " Who was heV 
Nay, if they should say, " Who the devil was he ? " it 
were a pardonable invocation, for none so fit as the 
Prince of Darkness to act as cicerone among such pal- 
pable obscurities. We recall the court-yard of the Uffizj 
at Florence. That also is not free of parish celebrities ; 
but Dante, Galileo, Michael Angelo, Macchiavelli, — shall 
the inventor of the sewing-machine, even with the button- 
holing improvement, let us say, match with these, or 
with far lesser than these ] Perhaps he was more prac- 
tically useful than any one of these, or all of them to- 
gether, but the soul is sensible of a sad difference some- 
where. These also were citizens of a provincial capital ; 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 89 

so were the greater part of Plutarch's heroes. Did they 

have a better chance than we moderns, — than wo 

Americans ] At any rate they have the start of us, and 

we must confess that 

" By bed and table they lord it o'er us, 
Our elder brothers, but one in blood." 

Yes, one in blood ; that is the hardest part of it. Is 
our provincialism then in some great measure due to 
our absorption in the practical, as we politely call it, 
meaning the material, — to our habit of estimating 
greatness by the square mile and the hundred weight 1 
Even during our war, in the midst of that almost unri- 
valled stress of soul, were not our speakers and newspa- 
pers so enslaved to the vulgar habit as to boast ten 
times of the thousands of square miles it covered with 
armed men, for once that they alluded to the motive 
that gave it all its meaning and its splendor ? Perhaps 
it was as well that they did not exploit that passion of 
patriotism as an advertisement in the style of Barnum 
or Perham. *' I scale one hundred and eighty pounds, 
but when I 'm mad I weigh two ton," said the Ken- 
tuckian, with a true notion of moral avoirdupois. That 
ideal kind of weight is wonderfully increased by a na- 
tional feeling, whereby one man is conscious that thirty 
millions of men go into the balance with him. The 
Roman in ancient, and the Englishman in modern times, 
have been most conscious of this representative solidity, 
and wherever one of them went there stood Rome or 
England in his shoes. We have made some advance in 
the right direction. Our civil war, by the breadth of its 
proportions and the implacability of its demands, forced 
us to admit a truer valuation, and gave us, in our own 
despite, great soldiers and sailors, allowed for such by all 
the world. The harder problems it has left behind may 
in time compel us to have great statesmen, with views 



90 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

capable of reaching beyond the next election. The 
criticism of Europe alone can rescue us from the provin- 
cialism of an over or false estimate of ourselves. Let us 
be thankful, and hot angry, that we must accept it as 
our touchstone. Our stamp has so often been impressed 
upon base metal, that we cannot expect it to be taken 
on trust, but we may be sure that true gold will be 
equally persuasive the world over. Real manhood and 
honest achievement are nowhere provincial, but enter 
the select society of all time on an even footing. 

Spanish America might be a good glass for us to look 
into. Those Catharine-wheel republics, always in revolu- 
tion while the powder lasts, and sure to burn the fingers 
of whoever attempts intervention, have also their great 
men, as placidly ignored by us as our own by jealous 
Europe. The following passage from the life of Don 
Simon Bolivar might allay many motus animontm, if 
rightly pondered. Bolivar, then a youth, was travelling in 
Italy, and his biographer tells us that " near Castiglione 
he was present at the grand review made by Napoleon of 
the columns defiling into the plain large enough to con- 
tain sixty thousand men. The throne was situated on 
an eminence that overlooked the plain, and Napoleon on 
several occasions looked through a glass at Bolivar and 
his companions, who were at the base of the hill. The 
hero Caesar could not imagine that he behold the libera- 
tor of the world of Columbus ! " And small blame to 
him, one would say. We are not, then, it seems, the 
only foundling of Columbus, as we are so apt to take for 
granted. The great Genoese did not, as we supposed, 
draw that first star-guided furrow across the vague of 
waters with a single eye to the future greatness of the 
United States. And have we not sometimes, like the 
enthusiastic biographer, fancied the Old World staring 
through all its telescopes at us, and wondered that it did 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 91 

not recognize in us what we were fully persuaded we 
were going to be and do 1 

Our American life is dreadfully barren of those ele- 
ments of the social picturesque which give piquancy to 
anecdote. And without anecdote, what is biography, or 
even history, which is only biography on a larger scale ^ 
Clio, though she take airs on herself, and pretend to be 
"philosophy teaching by example," is, after all, but a 
gossip who has borrowed Fame's speaking-trumpet, and 
should be figured with a tea-cup instead of a scroll in 
her hand. How much has she not owed of late to the 
tittle-tattle of her gillflirt sister Thalia % In what gut- 
ters has not Macaulay raked for the brilliant bits with 
which he has put together his admirable mosaic picture 
of England under the last two Stuarts 1 Even Mommsen 
himself, who dislikes Plutarch's method as much as 
Montaigne loved it, cannot get or give a lively notion of 
ancient Koine, without running to the comic poets and 
the anecdote-mongers. He gives us the very beef-tea 
of history, nourishing and even palatable enough, excel- 
lently portable for a memory that must carry her own 
packs, and can afford little luggage ; but for our own 
part, we prefer a full, old-fashioned meal, with its side- 
dishes of spicy gossip, and its last relish, the Stilton 
of scandal, so it be not too high. One volume of con- 
temporary memoirs, stuffed though it be with lies, (for 
lies to be good for anything must have a potential prob- 
ability, must even be true so far as their moral and 
social setting is concerned,) will throw more light into 
the dark backward of time than the gravest Camden or 
Thuanus. If St. Simon is not accurate, is he any the 
less essentially true ? No history gives us so clear an 
understanding of the moral condition of average men 
after the restoration of the Stuarts as the unconscious 
blabbings of the Puritan tailor's son, with his two con- 



92 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

sciences, as it were, — an inward, still sensitive in spots, 
though mostly toughened to India-rubber, and good 
rather for rubbing out old scores than retaining thern, 
and an outward, alert, and termagantly effective in Mrs. 
Pepys. But we can have no St. Simons or Pepyses 
till we have a Paris or London to delocalize our gossip 
and give it historic breadth. All our capitals are frac- 
tional, merely greater or smaller gatherings of men, 
centres of business rather than of action or influence. 
Each contains so many souls, but is not, as the word 
" capital " implies, the true head of a community and 
seat of its common soul. 

Has not life itself perhaps become a little more prosaic 
than it once was 1 As the clearing away of the woods 
scants the streams, may not our civilization have dried 
up some feeders that helped to swell the current of 
individual and personal force ] We have sometimes 
thought that the stricter definition and consequent 
seclusion from each other of the different callings in 
modern times, as it narrowed the chance of developing 
and giving variety to character, lessened also the interest 
of biography. Formerly arts and arms were not divided 
by so impassable a barrier as now. There was hardly 
such a thing as a pekin. Caesar gets up from writing 
his Latin Grammar to (fonquer Gaul, change the course 
of history, and make so many things possible, — among 
the rest our English language and Shakespeare. Horace 
had been a colonel ; and from ^Eschylus, who fought at 
Marathon, to Ben Jonson, who trailed a pike in the Low 
Countries, the list of martial civilians is a long one. A 
man's education seems more complete who has smelt 
hostile powder from a less aesthetic distance than Goethe. 
It raises our confidence in Sir Kenelm Digby as a physi- 
cist, that he is able to illustrate some theory of acous- 
tics in his Treatise of Bodies by instancing the effect of 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 93 

his guns in a sea-fight off Scanderoon. One would ex- 
pect the proportions of character to be enlarged by such 
variety and contrast of experience. Perhaps it will by 
and by appear that our own Civil War has done some- 
thing for -us in this way. Colonel Higginson conies 
down from his pulpit to draw on his jack-boots, and 
thenceforth rides in our imagination alongside of John 
Bunyan and Bishop Compton. To have stored moral 
capital enough to meet the drafts of Death at sight, 
must be an unmatched tonic. We saw our light-hearted 
youth come back with the modest gravity of age, as if 
they had learned to throw out pickets against a surprise 
of any weak point in their temperament. Perhaps that 
American shiftiness, so often complained of, may not 
be so bad a thing, if, by bringing men acquainted with 
every humor of fortune and human nature, it puts them 
in fuller possession of themselves. 

But with whatever drawbacks in special circumstances, 
the main interest of biography must always lie in the 
amount of character or essential manhood which the 
subject of it reveals to us, and events are of import 
only as means to that end. It is true that lofty and 
far-seen exigencies may give greater opportunity to some 
men, whose energy is more sharply spurred by the shout 
of a multitude than by the grudging Well done ! of con- 
science. Some theorists have too hastily assumed that, 
as the power of public opinion increases, the force of 
private character, or what we call originality, is ab- 
sorbed into and diluted by it. But we think Horace 
was right in putting tyrant and mob on a level as the 
trainers and tests of a man's solid quality. The amount 
of resistance of which one is capable to whatever lies 
outside the conscience, is of more consequence than all 
other faculties together; and democracy, perhaps, tries 
this by pressure in more directions, and with a more 



94 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

continuous strain, than any other form of society. In 
Josiah Quincy we have an example of character trained 
and shaped, under the nearest approach to a pure 
democracy the world has ever seen, to a firmness, unity, 
and self-centred poise that recall the finer types of anti- 
quity, in whom the public and private man were so 
wholly of a piece that they were truly everywhere at 
home, for the same sincerity of nature that dignified the 
hearth carried also a charm of homeliness into the forum. 
The phrase "a great public character," once common, 
seems to be going out of fashion, perhaps because there 
are fewer examples of the thing. It fits Josiah Quincy 
exactly. Active in civic and academic duties till beyond 
the ordinary period of man, at fourscore and ten his pen, 
voice, and venerable presence were still efficient in pub- 
lic affairs. A score of years after the energies of even 
vigorous men are declining or spent, his mind and char- 
acter made themselves felt as in their prime. A true 
pillar of house and state, he stood unflinchingly upright 
under whatever burden might be laid upon him. The 
French Revolutionists aped what was itself but a parody 
of the elder republic, with their hair a la Brutus and 
their pedantic moralities d la Cato Minor, but this man 
unconsciously was the antique Roman they laboriously 
went about to be. Others have filled places more con- 
spicuous, few have made the place they filled so conspicu- 
ous by an exact and disinterested performance of duty. 

In the biography of Mr. Quincy by his son there is 
something of the provincialism of which we have spoken 
as inherent in most American works of the kind. His 
was a Boston life in the strictest sense. But provincial- 
ism is relative, and where it has a flavor of its own, as 
in Scotland, it is often agreeable in proportion to its 
very intensity. The Massachusetts in which Mr. Quin- 
cy' s habits of thought were acquired was a very different 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 95 

Massachusetts from that in which we of later generations 
have been bred. Till after he had passed middle life, 
Boston was more truly a capital than any other city in 
America, before or since, except possibly Charleston. 
The acknowledged head of New England, with a popula- 
tion of wellnigh purely English descent, mostly derived 
from the earlier emigration, with ancestral traditions and 
inspiring memories of its own, it had made its name 
familiar in both worlds, and was both historically and 
politically more important than at any later period. 
The Revolution had not interrupted, but rather given a 
freer current to the tendencies of its past. Both by its 
history and position, the town had what the French call 
a solidarity, an almost personal consciousness, rare any- 
where, rare especially in America, and more than ever 
since our enormous importation of fellow-citizens to 
whom America means merely shop, or meat three times 
a day. Boston has been called the "American Athens." 
^Esthetically, the comparison is ludicrous, but politically 
it was more reasonable. Its population was homogene- 
ous, and there were leading families ; while the form of 
government by town-meeting, and the facility of social 
and civic intercourse, gave great influence to popular 
pergonal qualities and opportunity to new men. A wide 
commerce, while it had insensibly softened the asperities 
of Puritanism and imported enough foreign refinement 
to humanize, not enough foreign luxury to corrupt, had 
not essentially qualified the native tone of the town. 
Retired sea-captains (true brothers of Chaucer's Ship- 
man), whose exploits had kindled the imagination of 
Burke, added a not unpleasant savor of salt to society. 
They belonged to the old school of Gilbert, Hawkins, 
Frobisher, and Drake, parcel-soldiers all of them, who 
had commanded armed ships and had tales to tell of 
gallant fights with privateers or pirates, truest represent- 



96 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

atives of those Vikings who, if trade in lumber or peltry- 
was dull, would make themselves Dukes of Dublin or 
Earls of Orkney. If trade pinches the mind, commerce 
liberalizes it ; and Boston was also advantaged with 
the neighborhood of the country's oldest College, which 
maintained the wholesome traditions of culture, — where 
Homer and Horace are familiar there is a certain amount 
of cosmopolitanism, — and would not allow bigotry to 
become despotism. Manners were more self-respectful, 
and therefore more respectful of others, and personal 
sensitiveness was fenced with more of that ceremonial 
with which society armed itself when it surrendered the 
ruder protection of the sword. We had not then seen a 
Governor in his chamber at the State-House with his 
hat on, a cigar in his mouth, and his feet upon the stove. 
Domestic service, in spite of the proverb, was not seldom 
an inheritance, nor was household peace dependent on 
the whim of a foreign armed neutrality in the kitchen. 
Servant and master were of one stock ; there was decent 
authority and becoming respect ; the tradition of the 
Old World lingered after its superstition had passed 
away. There was an aristocracy such as is healthful 
in a well-ordered community, founded on public service, 
and hereditary so long as the virtue which was its patent 
was not escheated. The clergy, no longer hedged by 
the reverence exacted by sacerdotal caste, were more 
than repaid by the consideration willingly paid to supe- 
rior culture. What changes, many of them for the bet- 
ter, some of them surely for the worse, and all of them 
inevitable, did not Josiah Quincy see in that wellnigh 
secular life which linked the war of independence to the 
war of nationality ! We seemed to see a type of them 
the other day in a colored man standing with an air of 
comfortable self-possession while his boots were brushed 
by a youth of catholic neutral tint, but whom nature had 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 97 

planned for white. The same eyes that had looked on 
Gage's red-coats, saw Colonel Shaw's negro regiment 
march out of Boston in the national blue. Seldom has a 
life, itself actively associated with public affairs, spanned 
so wide a chasm for the imagination. Oglethorpe's 
offers a parallel, — the aide-de-camp of Prince Eugene 
calling on John Adams, American Ambassador to Eng- 
land. Most long lives resemble those threads of gos- 
samer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly 
prolonged, scarce visible pathway of some worm from 
his cradle to his grave ; but Quincy's was strung with 
seventy active years, each one a rounded bead of useful- 
ness and service. 

Mr. Quincy was a Bostonian of the purest type. 
Since the settlement of the town, there had been a 
colonel of the Boston regiment in every generation of his 
family. He lived to see a grandson brevetted with the 
same title for gallantry in the field. Only child of one 
among the most eminent advocates of the Revolution, 
and who but for his untimely death would have been a 
leading actor in it, his earliest recollections belonged to 
the heroic period in the history of his native town. 
With that history his life was thenceforth intimately 
united by offices of public trust, as Representative in 
Congress, State Senator, Mayor, and President of the 
University, to a period beyond the ordinary span of 
mortals. Even after he had passed ninety, he would 
not claim to be emeritus, but came forward to brace his 
townsmen with a courage and warm them with a fire 
younger than their own. The legend of Colonel Goffe 
at Deerfield became a reality to the eyes of this genera- 
tion. The New England breed is running out, we are 
told ! This was in all ways a beautiful and fortunate 
life, — fortunate in the goods of this world, — fortunate, 
above all, in the force of character which makes fortune 



98 A GEE AT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

secondary and subservient. We are fond in this country 
of what are called self-made men (as if real success could 
ever be other) ; and this is all very well, provided they 
make something worth having of themselves. Otherwise 
it is not so well, and the examples of such are at best 
but stuff for the Alnaschar dreams of a false democracy. 
The gist of the matter is, not where a man starts from, 
but where he comes out. We are glad to have the 
biography of one w T ho, beginning as a gentleman, kept 
himself such to the end, — who, with no necessity of 
labor, left behind him an amount of thoroughly done 
work such as few have accomplished with the mighty 
help of hunger. Some kind of pace may be got out of 
the veriest jade by the near prospect of oats ; but the 
thorough-bred has the spur in his blood. 

Mr. Edmund Quincy has told the story of his father's 
life w T ith the skill and good taste that might have been 
expected from the author of " Wensley." Considering 
natural partialities, he has shown a discretion of which 
we are oftener reminded by missing than by meeting it. 
He has given extracts enough from speeches to show 
their bearing and quality, — from letters, to recall by- 
gone modes of thought and indicate many-sided friendly 
relations with good and eminent men ; above all, he has 
lost no opportunity to illustrate that life of the past, 
near in date, yet alien in manners, whose current glides 
so imperceptibly from one generation into another that 
we fail to mark the shiftings of its bed or the change in 
its nature wrought by the affluents that discharge into 
it on all sides, — here a stream bred in the hills to 
sweeten, there the sewerage of some great city to cor- 
rupt. We cannot but lament that Mr. Quincy did not 
earlier begin to keep a diary. " Miss not the discourses 
of the elders," thoijgh put now in the Apocrypha, is a 
w T ise precept, but incomplete unless we add, " Nor cease 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 99 

from recording whatsoever thing thou hast gathered 
therefrom," — so ready is Oblivion with her fatal shears. 
The somewhat greasy heap of a literary rag-and-bone- 
picker, like Athenseus, is turned to gold by time. Even 
the Virgilium vidi tcuitum of Dry den about Milton, and 
of Pope again about Dryden, is worth having, and gives 
a pleasant fillip to the fancy. There is much of this 
quality in Mr. Edmund Quincy's book, enough to make 
us wish there were more. We get a glimpse of President 
Washington, in 1795, who reminded Mr. Quincy "of 
the gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those 
days to attend the General Court from Hampden or 
Frai klin County, in the western part of the State. A 
littie stiff in his person, not a little formal in his man- 
ners, not particularly at ease in the presence of strangers. 
He had the air of a country-gentleman not accustomed 
to mix much in society, perfectly polite, but not easy in 
his address and conversation, and not graceful in his gait 
and movements." Our figures of Washington have 
been so long equestrian, that it is pleasant to meet him 
dismounted for once. In the same way we get a card of 
invitation to a dinner of sixty covers at John Hancock's, 
and see the rather light-weighted great man wheeled 
round the room (for he had adopted Lord Chatham's 
convenient trick of the gout) to converse with his guests. 
In another place we are presented, with Mr. Merry, S^ 
English Minister, to Jefferson, whom we find in an un- 
official costume of studied slovenliness, intended as a snub 
to haughty Albion. Slippers down at the heel and a 
dirty shirt become weapons of diplomacy and threaten 
more serious war. Thus many a door into the past, long 
irrevocably shut upon us, is set ajar, and we of the 
younger generation on the landing catch peeps of dis- 
tinguished men, and bits of their table-talk. We drive 
in from Mr. Lyman's beautiful seat at Walt ham (unique 



100 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

at that day in its stately swans and half-shy, half-familiar 
deer) with John Adams, who tells us that Dr. Priestley 
looked on the French monarchy as the tenth horn of the 
Beast in Revelation, — a horn that has set more sober 
wits dancing than that of Huon of Bordeaux. Those 
were days, we are inclined to think, of more solid and 
elegant hospitality than oar own, — the elegance of 
manners, at once more courtly and more frugal, of men 
who had better uses for wealth than merely to display it. 
Dinners have more courses now, and, like the Gascon in 
the old story, who could not see the town for the houses, 
we miss the real dinner in the multiplicity of its details. 
We might seek long before we found so good che^r, so 
good company, or so good talk as oar fathers had at 
Lieutenant-Governor Winthrop's or Senator Cabot's. 

We shall not do Mr. Edmund Quiney the wrong of 
picking out in advance all the plums in his volume, 
leaving to the reader only the less savory mixture that 
held them together, — a kind of filling unavoidable in 
books of this kind, and too apt to be what- boys at 
boarding-school call stick-jaiv, but of which there is no 
more than could not be helped here, and that light and 
palatable. But here and there is a passage where we 
cannot refrain, for there is a smack of Jack Horner in all 
of us, and a reviewer were nothing without it. Josiah 
Quiney was born in 1772. His father, returning from a 
mission to England, died in sight of the dear New Eng- 
land shore three years later. His young widow was 
worthy of him, and of the son whose character she was 
to have so large a share in forming. There is some- 
thing very touching and beautiful in this little picture 
of her which Mr. Quiney drew in his extreme old age. 

" My mother imbibed, as was usual w T ith the women 
of the period, the spirit of the times. Patriotism was 
not then a profession, but an energetic principle beating 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 101 

in the heart and active in the life. The death of my 
father, under circumstances now the subject of history, 
had overwhelmed her with grief. She viewed him as 
a victim in the cause of freedom, and cultivated his 
memory with veneration, regarding him as a martyr, fall- 
ing, as did his friend Warren, in the defence of the liber- 
ties of his country. These circumstances gave a pathos 
and vehemence to her grief, which, after the first violence 
of passion had subsided, sought consolation in earnest 
and solicitous fulfilment of duty to the representative of 
his memory and of their mutual affections. Love and 
reverence for the memory of his father was early im- 
pressed on the mind of her son, and worn into his heart 
by her sadness and tears. She cultivated the memory of 
my father in my heart and affections, even in my earliest 
childhood, by reading to me passages from the poets, and 
obliging me to learn by heart and repeat such as were 
best adapted to her own circumstances and feelings. 
Among others, the whole leave-taking of Hector and 
Andromache, in the sixth book of Pope's Homer, was one 
of her favorite lessons, which she made me learn and fre- 
quently rejjeat. Her imagination, probably, found con- 
solation in the repetition of lines which brought to mind 
and seemed to typify her own great bereavement. 

' And think'st thou not how wretched we shall be, — 
A widow I, a helpless orphan he ? ' 

These lines, and the whole tenor of Andromache's ad- 
dress and circumstances, she identified with her own 
sufferings, which seemed relieved by the tears my repe- 
tition of them drew from her." 

Pope's Homer is not Homer, perhaps ; but how many 
noble natures have felt its elation, how many bruised 
spirits the solace of its bracing, if monotonous melody ! 
To us there is something inexpressibly tender in this in- 
stinct of the widowed mother to find consolation in the 



102 A GREAT PUBLIC CHAfiACTE& 

Idealization of ber grief by mingling it "with tnoSe Bor- 
rows which genius has turned into the perennial delight 
of mankind. This was a kind of Bentimenl that was 
healthy for her boy, refining wit hunt, unnerving, and as- 
Bociating his Father's memory with a noble company un- 
assailable by time. It was through this lady, whose 
image looks down on us out of tin* past, so Full of 
sweetness and refinement, that Mr. Quincy became of 
km with Mr. Wendell Phillips, so justly eminent as a 
Bpeaker. There is something dearer than cater-cousin- 
ship in a certain impetuous audaoity of temper common 
to them bot h. 

When six yean old, Mr. Quinoy was scut to Phillipa 

Academy at Andovor, where he remained till lie entered 

oollege. His form Fellow here was a man iA' thirty, who 
had been a surgeon in the Continental Army, and 

whose character and ad\euturcs might almost seem bor- 
rowed from a romance of Smollett. Under Principal 
Pearson, the lad, though a near relative of the Founder 

<A' the school, seems to have endured all that severity of 

the old a posteriori method of teaching which still 
smarted in Tusser's memory when he sang, 

" From Paul's I went, to Ktoti sent, 

To learn stralghtways the Latin phrase, 
Where fifty three stripes given to mo 
At once l had." 

The young viotim of the wisdom of Solomon was boarded 

With the parish minister, in whose kindness he found :l 

lenitive for the scholastic discipline he underwent. This 
gentleman had been a soldier in the Colonial service, and 

Mr. QuinOy afterwards gave as a reason for his mildness, 
that, ''while a Sergeant at Castle William, he had seen 
BOmething o\' mankind." This, no doubt, would he a 
better preparative for successful dealing with the young 

than is generally thought However, the birch wad 



A GBEAT PUDLIC CHARAOTI I LOS 

(lien llir only • ■ I . t : . i< • Inv, Mini every round in Mir huMcr 

of loaming w.i made of Its Inspiring wood, Dr. Peai 
■ , perhaps, thoughl he was only doing justioe to his 
pupil's t - 1 . 1 1 1 1 1 :h of kindred bj giving him a largor share of 
the educational advantages which the neighboring forest 
afforded, Tho vividness with which this systom is al 
ways remembered by those who have boon subjected to It 
would soom to ii< -w thai it really euiivonod tlie attentioni 
and thorobj Invigorated the memory, nay, might oven 
i .1 1 o ; omo question as to what part of the porson is chosen 
by tho mothor of the Muses for her rosidenoe, With 
an appetite for the olassios quiokonod by "Cheover's 
A.ooidonoo," and Much other preliminary whots as were 
iln n in vogue, voung Quinoy ontorod college, where ho 
spent the usual four years, and was graduated with tho 

highest i rs of his class, Tho amount of Latin and 

Greek impartod to the studonts of that day was not 
\<T\ groat They wore carried through Horace, Sallust, 
mill the De Oratoribut of Cioero, and read portions of 
Livy, Konophon, and Efomor, Yet tho ohiof ond of olas 
sioal studios was perhaps h • often reaohed then as now, 
in giving voung men q love for something apart from 
and above the more vulgar associations of life, Mr. 
Quinoy, at least, retained to the last a fondness for 
certain Latin authors, While he was President of the 
College, he told q goutloman, from whom wo rooeived 
the story, that, "if he were imprisonod, and allowed 
io choose one book for his amusement, that should 
be Horaoe." 

In I7 ( .»7 Mr. Quinoy was married to Miss Eliza Susan 
Morton of New York, a union whioh lasted in unbroki n 
happinosi for more than fifty veari His oase might bo 
oitod among the leading ones in support of the old poet's 
b . ii 'in, i hat 

•■ j i . ii. vi i [oved, Mini loved not At (In t light "; 



104 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

for he saw, wooed, and won in a week. In later life he 
tried in a most amusing way to account for this rash- 
ness, and to find reasons of settled gravity for the happy 
inspiration of his heart. He cites the evidence of Judge 
Sedgwick, of Mr. and Mrs. Oliver Wolcott, of the llev. 
Dr. Smith, and others, to the wisdom of his choice. 
But it does not appear that he consulted them before- 
hand. If love were not too cunning for that, what 
would become of the charming idyl, renewed in all its 
wonder and freshness for every generation 1 Let us be 
thankful that in every man's life there is a holiday of 
romance, an illumination of the senses by the soul, that 
makes him a poet while it lasts. Mr. Quincy caught 
the enchantment through his ears, a song of Burns 
heard from the next room conveying the infection, — a 
fact still inexplicable to him after lifelong meditation 
thereon, as he " was not very impressible by music " ! 
To us there is something very characteristic in this 
rapid energy of Mr. Quincy, something very delightful 
in his naive account of the affair. It needs the magie 
of no Dr. Heidegger to make these dried roses, that 
drop from between the leaves of a volume shut for 
seventy years, bloom again in all their sweetness. Mr. 
Edmund Quincy tells us that his mother was "not hand- 
some " ; but those who remember the gracious dignity 
of her old age will hardly agree with him. She must 
always have had that highest kind of beauty which 
grows more beautiful with years, and keeps the eyes 
young, as if with the partial connivance of Time. 

We do not propose to follow Mr. Quincy closely 
through his whole public life, which, beginning with his 
thirty-second, ended with his seventy-third year. He 
entered Congress as the representative of a party pri- 
vately the most respectable, publicly the least sagacious, 
among all those which under different names have 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 105 

divided the country. The Federalists were the only- 
proper tories our politics have ever produced, whose 
conservatism truly represented an idea, and not a mere 
selfish interest, — men who honestly distrusted democ- 
racy, and stood up for experience, or the tradition which 
they believed for such, against empiricism. During 
his Congressional career, the government was little more 
than an attache of the French legation, and the opposi- 
tion to which he belonged a helpless revenant from the 
dead and buried Colonial past. There are some ques- 
tions whose interest dies the moment they are settled j 
others, into which a moral element enters that hinders 
them from being settled, though they may be decided. 
It is hard to revive any enthusiasm about the Embargo, 
though it once could inspire the boyish Muse of Bryant, 
or in the impressment quarrel, though the Trent diffi- 
culty for a time rekindled its old animosities. The stars 
in their courses fought against Mr. Quincy's party, 
which was not in sympathy with the instincts of the 
people, groping about for some principle of nationality, 
and nndino- a substitute for it in hatred of England. 
But there are several things which still make his career 
in Congress interesting to us, because they illustrate the 
personal character of the man. He prepared himself 
honestly for his duties, by a thorough study of whatever 
could make him efficient in them. It was not enough 
that he could make a good speech ; he wished also to 
have something to say. In Congress, as everywhere else, 
quod voluit valde voluit ; and he threw a fervor into the 
most temporary topic, as if his eternal salvation de- 
pended upon it. He had not merely, as the French say, 
the courage of his opinions, but his opinions became 
principles, and gave him that gallantry of fanaticism 
which made him always ready to head a forlorn hope, — • 
the more ready, perhaps, that it was a forlorn hope. 



106 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

This is not the humor of a statesman, — no, unless he 
holds a position like that of Pitt, and can charge a 
whole people with his own enthusiasm, and then we 
call it genius. Mr. Quincy had the moral firmness 
which enabled him to decline a duel without any loss 
of personal prestige. His opposition to the Louisiana 
purchase illustrates that Roman quality in him to which 
we have alluded. He would not conclude the pur- 
chase till each of the old thirteen States had signified 
its assent. He was reluctant to endow a Sabine city 
with the privilege of Roman citizenship. It is worth 
noting, that while in Congress, and afterwards in the 
State Senate, many of his phrases became the catch- 
words of party politics. He always dared to say what 
others deemed it more prudent only to think, and what- 
ever he said he intensified with the whole ardor of his 
temperament. It is this which makes Mr. Quincy's 
speeches good reading still, even when the topics they 
discussed were ephemeral. In one respect he is dis- 
tinguished from the politicians, and must rank with the 
far-seeing statesmen of his time. He early foresaw and 
denounced the political danger with which the Slave 
Power threatened the Union. His fears, it is true, were 
aroused for the balance of power between the old States, 
rather than by any moral sensitiveness, which would, 
indeed, have been an anachronism at that time. But 
the Civil War justified his prescience. 

It was as Mayor of his native city that his remark- 
able qualities as an administrator were first called into 
requisition and adequately displayed. He organized the 
city government, and put it in working order. To him 
we owe many reforms in police, in the management of 
the poor, and other kindred matters, — much in the 
way of cure, still more in that of prevention. The place 
demanded a man of courage and firmness, and found 
5* 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 107 

those qualities almost superabundantly in him. His 
virtues lost him his office, as such virtues are only too 
apt to do in peaceful times, where they are felt more as 
a restraint than a protection. His address on laying 
down the mayoralty is very characteristic. We quote 
the concluding sentences : — 

" And now, gentlemen, standing as I do in this relation 
for the last time in your presence and that of my fellow- 
citizens, about to surrender forever a station full of diffi- 
culty, of labor and temptation, in which I have been 
called to very arduous duties, affecting the rights, prop- 
erty, and at times the liberty of others ; concerning 
which the perfect line of rectitude — though desired — 
was not always to be clearly discerned ; in which great 
interests have been placed within my control, under cir- 
cumstances in which it would have been easy to advance 
private ends and sinister projects; — under these cir- 
cumstances, I inquire, as I have a right to inquire, — 
for in the recent contest insinuations have been cast 
against my integrity, — in this long management of 
your affairs, whatever errors have been committed, — 
and doubtless there have been many, — have you found 
in me anything selfish, anything personal, anything mer- 
cenary'? In the simple language of an ancient seer, I 
say, ' Behold, here I am ; witness against me. Whom 
have I defrauded 1 Whom have I oppressed % At 
whose hands have I received any bribe?' 

" Six years ago, when I had the honor first to address 
the City Council, in anticipation of the event which has 
now occurred, the following expressions were used : ' In 
administering the police, in executing the laws, in pro- 
tecting the rights and promoting the prosperity of the 
city, its first officer will be necessarily beset and assailed 
by individual interests, by rival projects, by personal in- 
fluences, by party passions. The more firm and inflexi- 



108 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

ble he is in maintaining the rights and in pursuing the 
interests of the city, the greater is the probability of his 
becoming obnoxious to the censure of all whom he 
causes to be prosecuted or punished, of all whose pas- 
sions he thwarts, of all whose interests he opposes.' 

" The day and the event have come. I retire — as in 
that first address I told my fellow-citizens, ' If, in con- 
formity with the experience of other republics, faithful 
exertions should be followed by loss of favor and confi- 
dence,' I should retire — •' rejoicing, not, indeed, with a 
public and patriotic, but with a private and individual 
joy ' ; for I shall retire with a consciousness weighed 
against which all human suffrages are but as the light 
dust of the balance." 

Of his mayoralty we have another anecdote quite 
Roman in color. He was in the habit of riding early in 
the morning through the various streets that he mio-ht 
look into everything with his own eyes. He was once 
arrested on a malicious charge of violating the city ordi- 
nance against fast driving. He might have resisted, but 
he appeared in court and paid the fine, because it would 
serve as a good example " that no citizen was above the 
law." 

Hardly had Mr. Quincy given up the government of 
the city, when he was called to that of the College. It 
is here that his stately figure is associated most inti- 
mately and warmly with the recollections of the greater 
number who hold his memory dear. Almost everybody 
looks back regretfully to the days of some Consul 
Plancus. Never were eyes so bright, never had wine so 
much wit and good-fellowship in it, never were we our- 
selves so capable of the various great things we have 
never done. Nor is it merely the sunset of life that 
casts such a ravishing light on the past, and makes the 
western windows of those homes of fancy we have left 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 109 

forever tremble with a sentiment of such sweet regret. 
We set great store by what we had, and cannot have 
again, however indifferent in itself, and what is past is 
infinitely past. This is especially true of college life, 
when we first assume the titles without the responsibili- 
ties of manhood, and the President of our year is apt to 
become our Plancus very early. Popular or not while 
in office, an ex-president is always sure of enthusiastic 
cheers at every college festival. Mr. Quincy had many 
qualities calculated to win favor with the young, — that 
one above all which is sure to do it, indomitable pluck. 
With him the dignity was in the man, not in the office. 
He had some of those little oddities, too, which afford 
amusement without contempt, and which rather tend to 
heighten than diminish personal attachment to superiors 
in station. His punctuality at prayers, and in dropping 
asleep there, his forgetfulness of names, his singular in- 
ability to make even the shortest off-hand speech to the 
students, — all the more singular in a practised ora- 
tor, — his occasional absorption of mind, leading him to 
hand you his sand-box instead of the leave of absence he 
had just dried with it, — the old-fashioned courtesy of 
his, " Sir, your servant," as he bowed you out of his 
study, — all tended to make him popular. He had also 
a little of what is somewhat contradictorily called dry 
humor, not without influence in his relations with the 
students. In taking leave of the graduating class, he 
was in the habit of paying them whatever honest com- 
pliment he could. Who, of a certain year which shall 
be nameless, will ever forget the gravity with which he 
assured them that they were " the best-dressed class that 
had passed through college during his administration " 1 
How sincerely kind he was, how considerate of youthful 
levity, will always be gratefully remembered by whoever 
had occasion to experience it. A visitor not long before 



110 A GEE AT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

his (learn found him burning some memoranda of college 
peccadilloes, lest they should ever rise up in judgment 
against the men eminent in Church and State who had 
been guilty of them. One great element of his popu- 
larity with the students was his esprit de corps. How- 
ever strict in discipline, he was always on our side as re- 
spected the outside world. Of his efficiency, no higher 
testimony could be asked than that of his successor, Dr. 
Walker. Here also many reforms date from his time. 
He had that happiest combination for a wise vigor in 
the conduct of affairs, — he was a conservative with an 
open mind. 

One would be apt to think that, in the various offices 
which Mr. Quincy successively filled, he would have 
found enough to do. But his indefatigable activity over- 
flowed. Even as a man of letters, he occupies no incon- 
siderable place. His " History of Harvard College " is 
a valuable and entertaining treatment of a subject not 
wanting in natural dryness. His " Municipal History 
of Boston," his " History of the Boston Athenaeum," 
and his " Life of Colonel Shaw " have permanent interest 
and value. All these were works demanding no little 
labor and research, and the thoroughness of their work- 
manship makes them remarkable as the by-productions 
of a busy man. Having consented, when more than 
eighty, to write a memoir of John Quincy Adams, to be 
published in the " Proceedings " of the Massachusetts 
Historical Society, he was obliged to excuse himself. 
On account of his age 1 Not at all, but because the 
work had grown to be a volume under his weariless 
hand. Ohne Hast ohne Bast, was as true of him as of 
Goethe. We find the explanation of his accomplishing 
so much in a rule of life which he gave, when President, 
to a young man employed as his secretary, and who was 
a little behindhand with his work : " When you have a 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER, 111 

number of duties to perform, always do the most dis- 
agreeable one first." No advice could have been more 
in character, and it is perhaps better than the great 
German's, "Do the duty that lies nearest thee." 

Perhaps the most beautiful part of Mr. Qnincy's life 
was his old age. What in most men is decay, was 
in him but beneficent prolongation and adjournment. 
His interest in affairs unabated, his judgment undimmed, 
his fire unchilled, his last years were indeed "lovely as 
a Lapland night." Till within a year or two of its fall, 
there were no signs of dilapidation in that stately edifice. 
Singularly felicitous was Mr. Winthrop's application to 
him of Wordsworth's verses : — 

11 The monumental pomp of age 
Was in that goodly personage.'* 

Everything that Macbeth foreboded the want of, he had 
in deserved abundance, — the love, the honor, the obe- 
dience, the troops of friends. His equanimity was beau- 
tiful. He loved life, as men of large vitality always do, 
but he did not fear to lose life by changing the scene of 
it. Visiting him in his ninetieth year with a friend, he 
said to us, among other things : "I have no desire to 
die, but also no reluctance. Indeed, I have a considera- 
ble curiosity about the other world. I have never been 
to Europe, you know." Even in his extreme senescence 
there was an April mood somewhere in his nature "that 
put a spirit of youth in everything." He seemed to feel 
that he could draw against an unlimited credit of years. 
When eighty-two, he said smilingly to a young man just 
returned from a foreign tour, " Well, well, I mean to go 
myself when I am old enough to profit by it." We have 
seen many old men whose lives were mere waste and 
desolation, who made longevity disreputable by their 
untimely persistence in it; but in Mr. Qnincy's length 
of years there was nothing that was not venerable. To 



112 A GEE AT PUBLIC CHAEACTER. 

him it was fulfilment, not deprivation ; the days were 
marked to the last for what they brought, not for what 
they took away. 

The memory of what Mr. Quincy did will be lost in 
the crowd of newer activities ; it is the memory of what 
he was that is precious to us. Bonum virum facile 
crederes, magnum lib&nter. If John Winthrop be the 
highest type of the men who shaped New England, wo 
can find no better one of those whom New England has 
shaped than Josiah Quincy. It is a figure that we can 
contemplate with more than satisfaction, — a figure of 
admirable example in a democracy as that of a model 
citizen. His courage and high-mindedness were personal 
to him ; let us believe that his integrity, his industry, 
his love of letters, his devotion to duty, go in some sort 
to the credit of the society which gave him birth and 
formed his character. .In one respect he is especially 
interesting to us, as belonging to a class of men of whom 
he was the last representative, and whose like we shall 
never see again. Born and bred in an age of greater 
social distinctions than ours, he was an aristocrat in 
a sense that is good even in a republic. He had the 
sense of a certain personal dignity inherent in him, and 
which could not be alienated by any whim of the popu- 
lar will. There is no stouter buckler than this for inde- 
pendence of spirit, no surer guaranty of that courtesy 
which, in its consideration of others, is but paying a 
debt of self-respect. During his presidency, Mr. Quincy 
was once riding to Cambridge in a crowded omnibus. A 
colored woman got in, and could nowhere find a seat. 
The President instantly gave her his own, and stood the 
rest of the way, a silent rebuke of the general rudeness. 
He was a man of quality in the true sense, — of quality 
not hereditary, but personal. Position might be taken 
from him, but he remained where he was. In what he 



A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 113 

valued most, his sense of personal worth, the world's 
opinion could neither help nor hinder. We do not 
mean that this was conscious in him ; if it had been, 
it would have been a weakness. It was an instinct, and 
acted with the force and promptitude proper to such. 
Let us hope that the scramble of democracy will give us 
something as good; anything of so classic dignity we 
shall not look to see again. 

Josiah Quincy was no seeker of office ; from first to 
last he and it were drawn together by the mutual attrac- 
tion of need and fitness, and it clung to him as most 
men cling to it. The people often make blunders in 
their choice ; they are apt to mistake presence of speech 
for presence of mind ; they love so to help a man rise 
from the ranks, that they will spoil a good demagogue to 
make a bad general ; a great many faults may be laid at 
their door, but they are not fairly to be charged with 
fickleness. They are constant to whoever is constant to 
his real self, to the best manhood that is in him, and 
not to the mere selfishness, the antica htpa so cunning to 
hide herself in the sheep's fleece even from ourselves. 
It is true, the contemporary world is apt to be the gull 
of brilliant parts, and the maker of a lucky poem or 
picture or statue, the winner of a lucky battle, gets per- 
haps more than is due to the solid result of his triumph. 
It is time that fit honor should be paid also to him -who 
shows a genius for public usefulness, for the achieve- 
ment of character, who shapes his life to a certain classic 
proportion, and comes oft conqueror on those inward 
fields where something more than mere talent is de- 
manded for victory. The memory of such men should 
be cherished as the most precious inheritance which one 
generation can bequeath to the nexi. However it might 
be with popular favor, public respect followed Mr. 
Quincy unwaveringly for seventy years, and it was 

n 



114 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 

because he had never forfeited his own. In this, it 
appears to us, lies the lesson of his life, and his claim 
upon our grateful recollection. It is this which makes 
him an example, while the careers of so many of our 
prominent men are only useful for warning. As regards 
history, his greatness was narrowly provincial; but if 
the measure of deeds be the spirit in which they are 
done, that fidelity to instant duty, which, according to 
Herbert, makes an action fine, then his length of years 
should be very precious to us for its lesson. Talleyrand, 
whose life may be compared with his for the strange 
vicissitude which it witnessed, carried with him out of 
the world the respect of no man, least of all his own ; 
and how many of our own public men have we seen 
whose old age but accumulated a disregard which they 
would gladly have exchanged for oblivion ! In Quincy 
the public fidelity was loyal to the private, and the with- 
drawal of his old age was into a sanctuary, — a diminu- 
tion of publicity with addition of influence. 

" Conclude we, then, felicity consists 

Not in exterior fortunes 

Sacred felicity doth ne'er extend 
Beyond itself. .... 
The swelling of an outward fortune can 
Create a prosperous, not a happy man." 



CARLYLE.* 



A FEELING of comical sadness is likely to come 
over the mind of any middle-aged man who sets 
himself to recollecting the names of different authors 
that have been famous, and the number of contemporary 
immortalities Vhose end he has seen since coming to man- 
flood. Many a light, hailed by too careless observers as 
a fixed star, has proved to be only a short-lived lantern 
at the tail of a newspaper kite. That literary heaven 
which our youth saw dotted thick with rival glories, we 
find now to have been a stage-sky merely, artificially 
enkindled from behind ; and the cynical daylight which 
is sure to follow all theatrical enthusiasms shows us 
ragged holes where once were luminaries, sheer vacancy 
instead of lustre. Our earthly reputations, says a great 
poet, are the color of grass, and the same sun that 
makes the green bleaches it out again. But next morn- 
ing is not the time to criticise the scene-painter's firma- 
ment, nor is it quite fair to examine coldly a part of 
some general illusion in the absence of that sympathetic 
enthusiasm, that self-surrender of the fancy, which made 
it what it was. It would not be safe for all neglected 
authors to comfort themselves in Wordsworth's fashion, 
inferring genius in an inverse proportion to public favor, 
and a high and solitary merit from the world's indiffer- 
ence. On the contrary, it would be more just to 
argue from popularity a certain amount of real value, 

* Apropos of his Frederick the Great. 



116 CAELYLE. 

though it may not be of that permanent quality which 
insures enduring fame. The contemporary world and 
Wordsworth were both half right. He undoubtedly 
owned and worked the richest vein of his period ; but 
he offered to his contemporaries a heap of gold-bearing 
quartz where the baser mineral made the greater show, 
and the purchaser must do his own crushing and smelt- 
ing, with no guaranty but the bare word of the miner. 
It was not enough that certain bolder adventurers 
should now and then show a nugget in proof of the 
success of their venture. The gold of the poet must 
be refined, moulded, stamped with the image and super- 
scription of his time, but with a beauty of design and 
finish that are of no time. The work must surpass the 
material. Wordsworth was wholly void of that shaping 
imagination which is the highest criterion of a poet. 

Immediate popularity and lasting fame, then, would 
seem to be the result of different qualities, and not of 
mere difference in degree. It is safe to prophesy a 
certain durability of recognition for any author who 
gives evidence of intellectual force, in whatever kind, 
above the average amount. There are names in literary 
history which are only names ; and the works associated 
with them, like acts of Congress already agreed on in 
debate, are read by their titles and passed. What is it 
that insures what may be called living fame, so that a 
book shall be at once famous and read ] What is it 
that relegates divine Cowley to that remote, uncivil 
Pontus of the " British Poets," and keeps garrulous 
Pepys within the cheery circle of the evening lamp and 
fire 1 Originality, eloquence, sense, imagination, not 
one of them is enough by itself, but only in some happy 
mixture and proportion. Imagination seems to possess 
in itself more of the antiseptic property than any other 
single quality ; but, without less showy and more sub- 



CARLYLE. 117 

stantial allies, it can at best give only deathlessness, 
without the perpetual youth that makes it other than 
dreary. It were easy to find examples of this Tithonus 
immortality, setting its victims apart from both gods 
and men ; helpless duration, undying, to be sure, but 
sapless and voiceless also, and long ago deserted by the 
fickle Hemera. And yet chance could confer that gift 
on Glaucus, which love and the consent of Zeus failed 
to secure for the darling of the Dawn. Is it mere luck, 
then'? Luck may, and often does, have some share in 
ephemeral successes, as in a gambler's winnings spent as 
soon as got, but not in any lasting triumph over time. 
Solid success must be based on solid qualities and the 
honest culture of them. 

The first element of contemporary popularity is un- 
doubtedly the power of entertaining. If a man have 
anything to tell, the world cannot be expected to listen 
to him unless he have perfected himself in the best way 
of telling it. People are not to be argued into a 
pleasurable sensation, nor is taste to be compelled by 
any syllogism, however stringent. An author may make 
himself very popular, however, and even justly so, by 
appealing to the passion of the moment, without having 
anything in him that shall outlast the public whim 
which he satisfies. Churchill is a remarkable example 
of this. He had a surprising extemporary vigor of 
mind ; his phrase carries great weight of blow ; he un- 
doubtedly surpassed all contemporaries, as Cowper says 
of him, in a certain rude and earth-born vigor ; but his 
verse is dust and ashes now, solemnly inurned, of course, 
in the Chalmers columbarium, and without danger of 
violation. His brawn and muscle are fading traditions, 
while the fragile, shivering genius of Cowper is still a 
good life on the books of the Critical Insurance Office. 
" Is it not, then, loftiness of mind that puts one by the 



118 CARLYLE. 

side of Virgil 1 " cries poor old Cavalcanti at his wits' 
end. Certainly not altogether that. There must be 
also the great Mantuan's art ; his power, not only of 
being strong in parts, but of making those parts cohe- 
rent in an harmonious whole, and tributary to it. Gray, 
if we may believe the commentators, has not an idea, 
scarcely an epithet, that he can call his own ; and yet 
he is, in the best sense, one of the classics of English 
literature. He had exquisite felicity of choice ; his 
dictionary had no vulgar word in it, no harsh one, but 
all culled from the luckiest moods of poets, and with a 
faint but delicious aroma of association ; he had a per- 
fect sense of sound, and one idea without which all the 
poetic outfit (si absit prudential) is of little avail, — that 
of combination and arrangement, in short, of art. The 
poets from whom he helped himself have no more claim 
to any of his poems as wholes, than the various beauties 
of Greece (if the old story were true) to the Venus of 
the artist. 

Imagination, as we have said, has more virtue to keep 
a book alive than any other single faculty. Burke is 
rescued from the usual doom of orators, because his 
learning, his experience, his sagacity are rimmed with a 
halo by this bewitching light behind the intellectual eye 
from the highest heaven of the brain. Shakespeare has 
impregnated his common sense with the steady glow of 
it, and answers the mood of youth and age, of high and 
low, immortal as that dateless substance of the soul he 
wrought in. To have any chance of lasting, a book 
must satisfy, not merely some fleeting fancy of the day, 
but a constant longing and hunger of human nature ; 
and it needs only a superficial study of literature to be 
convinced that real fame depends rather on the sum of 
an author's powers than on any brilliancy of special 
parts. There must be wisdom as well as wit, sense no 



CAELYLE. 119 

less than imagination, judgment in equal measure with 

• fancy, and the fiery rocket must be bound fast to the 
poor wooden stick that gives it guidance if it would 
mount and draw all eyes. There are some who think 
that the brooding patience which a great work calls for 
belonged exclusively to an earlier period than ours. 
Others lay the blame on our fashion of periodical publi- 
cation, which necessitates a sensation and a crisis in 
every number, and forces the writer to strive for start- 
ling effects, instead of that general lowness of tone 

* which is the last achievement of the artist. The sim- 
plicity of antique passion, the homeliness of antique 
pathos, seem not merely to be gone out of fashion, but 
out of being as well. Modern poets appear rather to 
tease their words into a fury, than to infuse them with 
the deliberate heats of their matured conception, and 
strive to replace the rapture of the mind with a fervid 
intensity of phrase. Our reaction from the decorous 
platitudes of the last century has no doubt led us to ex- 
cuse this, and to be thankful for something like real fire, 
though of stubble ; but our prevailing style of criticism, 
which regards parts rather than wholes, which dwells on 
the beauty of passages, and, above all, must have its 
languid nerves pricked with the expected sensation at 
whatever cost, has done all it could to confirm us in our 
evil way. Passages are good when they lead to some- 
thing, when they are necessary parts of the building, 
but they are not good to dwell in. This taste for the 
startling reminds us of something which happened once 
at the burning of a country meeting-house. The build- 
ing stood on a hill, and, apart from any other considera- 
tions, the fire was as picturesque as could be desired. 
When all was a black heap, licking itself here and there 
with tongues of fire, there rushed up a farmer gasping 
anxiously, "Hez the bell fell yit]" An ordinary fire 



120 CARLYLE. 

was no more to him than that on his hearthstone ; even 
the burning of a meeting-house, in itself a vulcanic 
rarity, (so long as he was of another parish,) could not 
tickle his outworn palate ; but he had hoped for a cer- 
tain tang in the downcome of the bell that might recall 
the boyish flavor of conflagration. There was something 
dramatic, no doubt, in this surprise of the brazen senti- 
nel at his post, but the Jbreatlilcss rustic has always 
seemed to us a type of the prevailing delusion in aesthet- 
ics. Alas ! if the bell must fall in every stanza or every 
monthly number, how shall an author contrive to stir us 
at last, unless with whole Moscows, crowned with the 
tintinnabulary crash of the Kremlin 1 For ourselves, we 
are glad to feel that we are still able to find content- 
ment in the more conversational and domestic tone 
of our old-fashioned wood-fire. No doubt a great part 
of our pleasure in reading is unexpectedness, w T hether in 
turn of thought or of phrase ; but an emphasis out 
of place, an intensity of expression not founded on 
sincerity of moral or intellectual conviction, reminds one 
of the underscorings in young ladies' letters, a wonder 
even to themselves under the colder north-light of ma- 
tronage. It is the part of the critic, howevei, to keep 
cool under whatever circumstances, and to reckon that 
the excesses of an author will be at first more attractive 
to the many than that average power which shall win 
him attention with a new generation of men. It is 
scMom found out by the majority, till after a considera- 
ble interval, that he was the original man^who contrived 
to be simply natural, — the hardest lesson in the school 
of art and the latest learned, if, indeed, it be a thing 
capable of acquisition at all. The most winsome and 
wayward of brooks draws now and then some lover's foot 
to its intimate reserve, while the spirt of a bursting 
water-pipe gathers a gaping crowd forthwith. 



CARLYLE. 121 

Mr. Carlyle is an author who has now been so long 
before the world, that we may feel toward him some- 
thing of the unprejudice of posterity. It has long been 
evident that he had no more ideas to bestow upon 
us, and that no new turn of his kaleidoscope would give 
us anything but some variation of arrangement in the 
brilliant colors of his style. It is perhaps possible, then, 
to arrive at some not wholly inadequate estimate of his 
place as a writer, and especially of the value of the ideas 
whose advocate he makes himself, with a bitterness and 
violence that increase, as it seems to us, in proportion as 
his inward conviction of their truth diminishes. 

The leading characteristics of an author who is in any 
sense original, that is to say, who does not merely repro- 
duce, but modifies the influence of tradition, culture, and 
contemporary thought upon himself by some admixture 
of his own, may commonly be traced more or less clearly 
in his earliest works. This is more strictly true, no 
doubt, of poets, because the imagination is a fixed quan- 
tity, not to be increased by any amount of study and 
reflection. Skill, wisdom, and even wit are cumulative ; 
but that diviner faculty, which is the spiritual eye, 
though it may be trained and sharpened, cannot be 
added to by taking thought. This has always been 
something innate, unaccountable, to be laid to a happy 
conjunction of the stars. Goethe, the last of the great 
poets, accordingly takes pains to tell us under what 
planets he was born ; and in him it is curious how 
uniform the imaginative quality is from the beginning 
to the end of his long literary activity. His early poems 
show maturity, his mature ones a youthful freshness. 
The apple already lies potentially in the blossom, as 
that may be traced also in the ripened fruit. With 
a mere change of emphasis, Goethe might be called an 
old boy at both ends of lus career. 
6 



122 CARLYLE. 

In the earliest authorship of Mr. Carlyle we find some 
not obscure hints of the future man. Nearly fifty years 
ago he contributed a few literary and critical articles to 
the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. The outward fashion of 
them is that of the period ; but they are distinguished 
by a certain security of judgment remarkable at any 
time, remarkable especially in one so young. British 
criticism has been always more or less parochial ; has 
never, indeed, quite freed itself from sectarian cant, and 
planted itself honestly on the aesthetic point of view. 
It cannot quite persuade itself that truth is of immortal 
essence, totally independent of all assistance from quar- 
terly journals or the British army and navy. Carlyle, 
in these first essays, already shows the influence of his 
master, Goethe, the most widely receptive of critics. In 
a compact notice of Montaigne, there is not a word as to 
his religious scepticism. The character is looked at 
purely from its human and literary sides. As illustrat- 
ing the bent of the author's mind, the following passage 
is most to our purpose: "A modern reader will not 
easily cavil at the patient and good-natured, though ex- 
uberant egotism which brings back to our view 'the 
form and pressure ' of a time long past. The habits and 
humors, the mode of acting and thinking ', which character- 
ized a Gascon gentleman in the sixteenth century, cannot 
fail to amuse an inquirer of the nineteenth ; ivhile the 
faithful delineation of human feel ings, in all their strength 
and tveahiess, will serve as a mirror to every mind capable 
of self examination." We find here no uncertain indica- 
tion of that eye for the moral picturesque, and that 
sympathetic appreciation of character, which within the 
next few years were to make Carlyle the first in insight 
of English critics and the most vivid of English histo- 
rians. In all his earlier writing he never loses sight of 
his master's great rule, Den Gegenstand fest zu halten. 



CARLYLE. 123 

He accordingly gave to Englishmen tne first humanly 
possible likeness of Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau, and 
others, who had hitherto been measured by the usual 
British standard of their respect for the geognosy of 
Moses and the historic credibility of the Books of Chron- 
icles. What was the real meaning of this phenomenon 1 
what the amount of this man's honest performance in the 
world 1 and in what does he show that family-likeness, 
common to all the sons of Adam, which gives us a fair 
hope of being able to comprehend him 1 These were the 
questions which Carlyle seems to have set himself hon- 
estly to answer in the critical writings which fill the first 
period of his life as a man of letters. In this mood he 
rescued poor Boswell from the unmerited obloquy of an 
ungrateful generation, and taught us to see something 
half-comically beautiful in the poor, weak creature, with 
his pathetic instinct of reverence for what was nobler, 
wiser, and stronger than himself. Everything that Mr. 
Carlyle wrote during this first period thrills with the 
purest appreciation of whatever is brave and beautiful 
in human nature, with the most vehement scorn of 
cowardly compromise with things base ; and yet, immit- 
igable as his demand for the highest in us seems to be, 
there is always something reassuring in the humorous 
sympathy with mortal frailty which softens condemna- 
tion and consoles for shortcoming. The remarkable 
feature of Mr. Carlyle's criticism (see, for example, his 
analysis and exposition of Goethe's "Helena") is the 
sleuth-hound instinct with which he presses on to the 
matter of his theme, — never turned aside by a false 
scent, regardless of the outward beauty of form, some- 
times almost contemptuous of it, in his hunger after the 
intellectual nourishment which it may hide. The deli- 
cate skeleton of admirably articulated and related parts 
which underlies and sustains every true work of art, and 



124 CARLYLE. 

keeps it from sinking on itself a' shapeless heap, he 
would crush remorselessly to come at the marrow of 
meaning. With him the ideal sense is secondary to the 
ethical and metaphysical, and he has but a faint con- 
ception of their possible unity. 

By degrees the humorous element in his nature gains 
ground, till it overmasters all the rest. Becoming al- 
ways more boisterous and obtrusive, it ends at last, as 
such humor must, in cynicism. In "Sartor Resartus" 
it is still kindly, still infused with sentiment ; and the 
book, with its mixture of indignation and farce, strikes 
one as might the prophecies of Jeremiah, if the marginal 
comments of the Rev. Mr. Sterne in his wildest mood 
had by some accident been incorporated with the text. 
In " Sartor " the marked influence of Jean Paul is un- 
deniable, both in matter and manner. It is curious for 
one who studies the action and reaction of national liter- 
atures on each other, to see the humor of Swift and 
Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, re- 
appear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes 
it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, 
to the English mind. Unhappily the bit of mother, from 
Swift's vinegar-barrel has had strength enough to sour 
all the rest. The whimsicality of " Tristram Shandy," 
which, even in the original, has too often the effect 
of forethought, becomes a deliberate artifice in Richter, 
and at last a mere mannerism in Carlyle. 

Mr. Carlyle in his critical essays had the advantage 
of a well-defined theme, and of limits both in the 
subject and in the space allowed for its treatment, which 
kept his natural extravagance within bounds, and com- 
pelled some sort of discretion and compactness. The 
great merit of these essays lay in a criticism based on 
wide and various study, which, careless of tradition, 
applied its standard to the real and not the contem- 



CARLYLE. 125 

porary worth of the literary or other performance to be 
judged, and in an unerring eye for that fleeting expres- 
sion of the moral features of character, a perception of 
which alone makes the drawing of a coherent likeness 
possible. Their defect was a tendency, gaining strength 
with years, to confound the moral with the aesthetic 
standard, and to make the value of an author's work 
dependent on the general force of his nature rather 
than on its special fitness for a given task. In propor- 
tion as his humor gradually overbalanced the other 
qualities of his mind, his taste for the eccentric, amor- 
phous, and violent in men became excessive, disturbing 
more and more his perception of the more common- 
place attributes which give consistency to portraiture. 
His " French Revolution " is a series of lurid pictures, 
unmatched for vehement power, in which the figures 
of such sons of earth as Mirabeau and Danton loom 
gigantic and terrible as in the glare of an eruption, their 
shadows swaying far and wide grotesquely awful. But 
all is painted by eruption-flashes in violent light and 
shade. There are no half-tints, no gradations, and we 
find it impossible to account for the continuance in 
power of less Titanic actors in the tragedy like Robes- 
pierre, on any theory whether of human nature or of 
individual character supplied by Mr. Carlyle. Of his 
success, however, in accomplishing what he aimed at, 
which was to haunt the mind with memories of a horri- 
ble political nightmare, there can be no doubt. 

Goethe says, apparently thinking of Richter, " The 
worthy Germans have persuaded themselves that the 
essence of true humor is formlessness." Heine had not 
yet shown that a German might combine the most airy 
humor with a sense of form as delicate as Goethe's own, 
and that there was no need to borrow the bow of Phi- 
loctetes for all kinds of game. Mr. Carlyle's own 



126 CARLYLE. 

tendency was toward the lawless, and the attraction of 
Jean Paul made it an overmastering one. Goethe, we 
think, might have gone farther, and affirmed that nothing 
but the highest artistic sense can prevent humor from 
degenerating into the grotesque, and thence downwards 
to utter anarchy. Rabelais is a striking example of 
it. The moral purpose of his book cannot give it that 
unity which the instinct and forethought of art only 
can bring forth. Perhaps we owe the masterpiece of 
humorous literature to the fact that Cervantes had been 
trained to authorship in a school where form predomi- 
nated over substance, and the most convincing proof of 
the supremacy of art at the highest period of Greek 
literature is to be found in Aristophanes. Mr. Carlyle 
has no artistic sense of form or rhythm, scarcely of 
proportion. Accordingly he looks on verse with con- 
tempt as something barbarous, — a savage ornament 
which a higher refinement will abolish, as it has tattoo- 
ing and nose-rings. With a conceptive imagination 
vigorous beyond any in his generation, with a mastery 
of language equalled only by the greatest poets, he wants 
altogether the plastic imagination, the shaping faculty, 
which would have made him a poet in the highest sense. 
He is a preacher and a prophet, — anything you will, — 
but an artist he is not, and never can be. It is always 
the knots and gnarls of the oak that he admires, never 
the perfect and balanced tree. 

It is certainly more agreeable to be grateful for what 
we owe an author, than to blame him for what he cannot 
give us. But it is sometimes the business of a critic to 
trace faults of style and of thought to their root in char- 
acter and temperament, — to show their necessary rela- 
tion to, and dependence on, each other, — and to find some 
more trustworthy explanation than mere wantonness of 
will for the moral obliquities of a man so largely moulded 



CAELYLE. 127 

and gifted as Mr. Carlyle. So long as he was merely an 
exhorter or dehorter, we were thankful for such elo- 
quence, such humor, such vivid or grotesque images, 
and such splendor of illustration as only he could give ; 
but when he assumes to be a teacher of moral and polit- 
ical philosophy, when he himself takes to compounding 
the social panaceas he has made us laugh at so often, 
and advertises none as genuine but his own, we begin to 
inquire into his qualifications and his defects, and to 
ask ourselves whether his patent pill differs from others 
except in the larger amount of aloes, or has any better 
recommendation than the superior advertising powers of 
a mountebank of genius. Comparative criticism teaches 
us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly 
related than is commonly supposed. Had Mr. Carlyle 
been fitted out completely by nature as an artist, he 
would have had an ideal in his work which would have 
lifted his mind away from the muddier part of him, and 
trained him to the habit of seeking and seeing the 
harmony rather than the discord and contradiction of 
things. His innate love of the picturesque, (which is 
only another form of the sentimentalism he so scoffs at, 
perhaps as feeling it a weakness in himself,) once turned 
in the direction of character, and finding its chief satis- 
faction there, led him to look for that ideal of human 
nature in individual men which is but fragmentary 
represented in the entire race, and is rather divined 
from the aspiration, forever disenchanted to be forever 
renewed, of the immortal part in us, than found in any 
example of actual achievement. A wiser temper would 
have found something more consoling than disheartening 
in the continual failure of men eminently endowed to 
reach the standard of this spiritual requirement, would 
perhaps have found in it an inspiring hint that it is 
mankind, and not special men, that are to be shaped at 



128 CARLYLE. 

last into the image of God, and that the endless life of 
the generations ma} 7 hope to come nearer that goal of 
which the short-breathed threescore years and ten fall 
too unhappily short. 

But Mr. Carlyle has invented the Hero-cure, and all 
who recommend any other method, or see any hope of 
healing elsewhere, are either quacks and charlatans or 
their victims. His lively imagination conjures up the 
image of an impossible he, as contradictorily endowed 
as the chief personage in a modern sentimental novel, 
and who, at all hazards, mast not lead mankind like a 
shepherd, but bark, bite, and otherwise worry them 
toward the fold like a truculent sheep-dog. If Mr. 
Carlyle woidcl only now and then recollect that men are 
men, and not sheep, — nay, that the farther they are 
from being such, the more well grounded our hope of 
one day making something better of them ! It is indeed 
strange that one who values Will so highly in the 
greatest, should be blind to its infinite worth in the least 
of men • nay, that he should so often seem to confound 
it with its irritable and purposeless counterfeit, Wilful- 
ness. The natural impatience of an imaginative tem- 
pei'ament, which conceives so vividly the beauty and 
desirableness of a nobler manhood and a diviner political 
order, makes him fret at the slow moral processes by 
which the All- Wise brings about his ends, and turns the 
very foolishness of men to his praise and glory. Mr. 
Carlyle is for calling down fire from Heaven whenever 
he cannot readily lay his hand on the match-box. No 
doubt it is somewhat provoking that it should be so easy 
to build castles in the air, and so hard to find tenants 
for them. It is a singular intellectual phenomenon to 
see a man, who earlier in life so thoroughly appreciated 
the innate weakness and futile tendency of the " storm 
and thrust" period of German literature, constantly 



CARLYLE. 129 

assimilating, as he grows older, more and more nearly to 
its principles and practice. It is no longer the sagacious 
and moderate Goethe who is his type of what is highest in 
human nature, but far rather some Gotz of the Iron Hand, 
some assertor of the divine legitimacy of Faustrecht. 
It is odd to conceive the fate of Mr. Carlyle under the 
sway of any of his heroes, — how Cromwell would have 
scorned him as a babbler more long-winded than Prynne, 
but less clear and practical, — how Friedrich would have 
scoffed at his tirades as dummes Zeug not to be compared 
with the romances of Crebillon fits, or possibly have 
clapped him in a marching regiment as a fit subject for 
the cane of the sergeant. Perhaps something of Mr. 
Carlyle's irritability is to be laid to the account of his 
early schoolmastership at Ecclefechan. This great booby 
World is such a dull boy, and will not learn the lesson 
we have taken such pains in expounding for the fiftieth 
time. Well, then, if eloquence, if example, if the awful 
warning of other little boys who neglected their acci- 
dence and came to the gallows, if none of these avail, the 
birch at least is left, and we will try that. The dominie 
spirit has become every year more obtrusive and in- 
tolerant in Mr. Carlyle's writing, and the rod, instead of 
being kept in its place as a resource for desperate cases, 
has become the alpha and omega of all successful train- 
ing, the one divinely-appointed means of human enlight- 
enment and progress, — in short, the final hope of that 
absurd animal who fancies himself a little lower than 
the angels. Have we feebly taken it for granted that 
the distinction of man was reason 1 Never was there a 
more fatal misconception. It is in the gift of unreason 
that we are unenviably distinguished from the brutes, 
whose nobler privilege of instinct saves them from our 
blunders and our crimes. 

But since Mr. Carlyle has become possessed with the 



130 CARLYLE. 

hallucination that he is head-master of this huge boys' 
school which we call the world, his pedagogic birch has 
grown to the taller proportions and more ominous as- 
pect of a gallows. His article on Dr. Francia was a 
panegyric of the halter, in which the gratitude of man- 
kind is invoked for the self-appointed dictator who had 
discovered in Paraguay a tree more beneficent than that 
which produced the Jesuits' bark. Mr. Carlyle seems to 
be in the condition of a man who uses stimulants, and 
must increase his dose from day to day as the senses 
become dulled under the spur. He began by admiring 
strength of character and purpose, and the manly self- 
denial which makes a humble fortune great by steadfast 
loyalty to duty. He has gone on till mere strength has 
become such washy weakness that there is no longer any 
titillation in it ; and nothing short of downright violence 
will rouse his nerves now to the needed excitement. At 
first he made out very well with remarkable men ; then, 
lessening the water and increasing the spirit, he took to 
Heroes : and now he must have downright ^humanity, 
or the draught has no savor ; — so he gets on at last to 
Kings, types of remorseless Force, who maintain the 
political views of Berserkers by the legal principles of 
Lynch. Constitutional monarchy is a failure, represen- 
tative government is a gabble, democracy a birth of the 
bottomless pit ; there is no hope for mankind except in 
getting themselves under a good driver who shall not 
spare the lash. And yet, unhappily for us, these drivers 
are providential births not to be contrived by any cun- 
ning of ours, and Friedrich II. is hitherto the last of 
them. Meanwhile the world's wheels have got fairly 
stalled in mire and other matter of every vilest consist- 
ency and most disgustful smell. What are we to do 1 
Mr. Carlyle will not let us make a lever with a rail from 
the next fence, or call in the neighbors. That would be 



CARLYLE. 131 

too commonplace and cowardly, too anarchical. No; 
he would have us sit down beside him in the slough, and 
shout lustily for Hercules. If that indispensable demi- 
god will not or cannot come, we can find a useful and 
instructive solace, during the intervals of shouting, in a 
hearty abuse of human nature, which, at the long last, 
is always to blame. 

Since " Sartor Resartus " Mr. Carlyle has done little 
but repeat himself with increasing emphasis and height- 
ened shrillness. Warning has steadily heated toward 
denunciation, and remonstrance soured toward scolding. 
The image of the Tartar prayer-mill, which he borrowed 
from Richter and turned to such humorous purpose, 
might be applied to himself. The same phrase comes 
round and round, only the machine, being a little crank- 
ier, rattles more, and the performer is called on for a 
more visible exertion. If there be not something very 
like cant in Mr. Carlyle's later writings, then cant is not 
the repetition of a creed after it has become a phrase by 
the cooling of that white-hot conviction which once made 
it both the light and warmth of the soul. We do not 
mean intentional and deliberate cant, but neither is that 
which Mr. Carlyle denounces so energetically in his fel- 
low-men of that conscious kind. We do not mean to 
blame him for it, but mention it rather as an interesting 
phenomenon of human nature. The stock of ideas 
which mankind has to work with is very limited, like the 
alphabet, and can at best have an air of freshness given 
it by new arrangements and combinations, or by applica- 
tion to new times and circumstances. Montaigne is but 
Ecclesiastes writing in the sixteenth century, Voltaire 
but Lucian in the eighteenth. Yet both are original, 
and so certainly is Mr. Carlyle, whose borrowing is 
mainly from his own former works. But he does this so 
often and so openly, that we may at least be sure that 



132 CARLYLE. 

he ceased growing a number of years ago, and is a 
remarkable example of arrested development. 

The cynicism, however, which has now become the 
prevailing temper of his mind, has gone on expanding 
with unhappy vigor. In Mr. Carlyle it is not, certainly, 
as in Swift, the result of personal disappointment, and 
of the fatal eye of an acconrplice for the mean qualities 
by which power could be attained that it might be used 
for purposes as mean. It seems rather the natural cor- 
ruption of his exuberant humor. Humor in its first 
analysis is a perception of the incongruous, and in its 
highest development, of the incongruity between the 
actual and the ideal in men and life. With so keen 
a sense of the ludicrous contrast between what men 
might be, nay, wish to be, and what they are, and with 
a vehement nature that demands the instant realization 
of his vision of a world altogether heroic, it is no wonder 
that Mr. Carlyle, always hoping for a thing and always 
disappointed, should become bitter. Perhaps if he 
expected less he would find more. Saul seeking his 
father's asses found himself turned suddenly into a king ; 
but Mr. Carlyle, on the lookout for a king, always seems 
to find the other sort of animal. He sees nothing on 
any side of him but a procession of the Lord of Misrule, 
in gloomier moments, a Dance of Death, where every- 
thing is either a parody of whatever is noble, or an aim- 
less jig that stumbles at last into the annihilation of the 
grave, and so passes from one nothing to another. Is a 
world, then, which buys and reads Mr. Carlyle's works 
distinguished only for its "fair, large ears'"? If he who 
has read and remembered so much would only now and 
then call to mind the old proverb, Nee dens, nee lupus, 
sed homo ! If he would only recollect that, from the 
days of the first grandfather, everybody has remembered 
a golden age behind him ! 



CARLYLE. 133 

The very qualities, it seems to us, which came so near 
making a great poet of Mr. Carlyle, disqualify him for 
the office of historian. The poet's concern is with the 
appearances of things, with their harmony in that whole 
which the imagination demands for its satisfaction, and 
their truth to that ideal nature which is the proper 
object of poetry. History, unfortunately, is very far 
from being ideal, still farther from an exclusive interest 
in those heroic or typical figures which answer all the 
wants of the epic and the drama and fill their utmost 
artistic limits. Mr. Carlyle has an unequalled power and 
vividness in painting detached scenes, in bringing out in 
their full relief the oddities or peculiarities of character ; 
but he has a far feebler sense of those gradual changes 
of opinion, that strange communication of sympathy 
from mind to mind, that subtile influence of very subor- 
dinate actors in giving a direction to policy or action, 
which we are wont somewhat vaguely to call the progress 
of events. His scheme of history is purely an epical one, 
where only leading figures appear by name and are in any 
strict sense operative. He has no conception of the peo- 
ple as anything else than an element of mere brute 
force in political problems, and would sniff scornfully at 
that unpicturesque common-sense of the many, which 
comes slowly to its conclusions, no doubt, but compels 
obedience even from rulers the most despotic when once 
its mind is made up. His history of Frederick is, of 
course, a Fritziad ; but next to his hero, the cane of the 
drill-sergeant and iron ramrods appear to be the condi- 
tions which to his mind satisfactorily account for the 
result of the Seven Years War. It is our opinion, which 
subsequent events seem to justify, that, had there not 
been in the Prussian people a strong instinct of nation- 
ality, Protestant nationality too, and an intimate convic- 
tion of its advantages, the war might have ended quite 



134 CARLYLE. 

otherwise. Frederick II. left the machine of war which 
he received from his father even more perfect than he 
found it, yet within a few years of his death it went to 
pieces before the shock of French armies animated by an 
idea. Again a few years, and the Prussian soldiery, in- 
spired once more by the old national fervor, were victori- 
ous. Were it not for the purely picturesque bias of 
Mr. Carlyle's genius, for the necessity which his epical 
treatment lays upon him of always having a protagonist, 
we should be astonished that an idealist like him should 
have so little faith in ideas and so much in matter. 

Mr. Carlyle's manner is not so well suited to the histo- 
rian as to the essayist. He is always great in single 
figures and striking episodes, but there is neither grada- 
tion nor continuity. He has extraordinary patience and 
conscientiousness in the gathering and sifting of his 
material, but is scornful of commonplace facts and char- 
acters, impatient of whatever will not serve for one of "his 
clever sketches, or group well in a more elaborate figure- 
piece. He sees history, as it were, by flashes of light- 
ning. A single scene, whether a landscape or an inte- 
rior, a single figure or a wild mob of men, whatever may 
be snatched by the eye in that instant of intense illumi- 
nation, is minutely photographed upon the memory. 
Eveiy tree and stone, almost every blade of grass ; every 
article of furniture in a room ; the attitude or expression, 
nay, the very buttons and shoe-ties of a principal figure ; 
the gestures of momentary passion in a wild throng, — 
everything leaps into vision under that sudden glare 
with a painful distinctness that leaves the retina quiver- 
ing. The intervals are absolute darkness. Mr. Carlyle 
makes us acquainted with the isolated spot where we 
happen to be when the flash comes, as if by actual eye- 
sight, but there is no possibility of a comprehensive 
view. No ether writer compares with him for vividness. 



CARLYLE. 135 

He is himself a witness, and makes ns witnesses of what- 
ever he describes. This is genius beyond a question, 
and of a very rare quality, but it is not history. He 
has not the cold-blooded impartiality of the historian ; 
and while he entertains us, moves us to tears or laughter, 
makes us the unconscious captives of his ever-changeful 
mood, we find that he has taught us comparatively little. 
His imagination is so powerful that it makes him the 
contemporary of his characters, and thus his history 
seems to be the memoirs of a cynical humorist, with 
hearty likes and dislikes, with something of acridity in 
his partialities whether for or against, more keenly sen- 
sitive to the grotesque than the simply natural, and who 
enters in his diary, even of what comes within the range 
of his own observation, only so much as amuses his 
fancy, is congenial with his humor, or feeds his prejudice. 
Mr. Carlyle's method is accordingly altogether picto- 
rial, his hasty temper making narrative wearisome to 
him. In his Friedrich, for example, we get very little 
notion of the civil administration of Prussia ; and when 
he comes, in the last volume, to his hero's dealings with 
civil reforms, he confesses candidly that it would tire him 
too much to tell us about it, even if he knew anything 
at all satisfactory himself. 

Mr. Carlyle's historical compositions are wonderful 
prose poems, full of picture, incident, humor, and char- 
acter, where we grow familiar with his conception of 
certain leading personages, and even of subordinate ones, 
if they are necessary to the scene, so that they come out 
living upon the stage from the dreary limbo of names ; 
but this is no more history than the historical plays of 
Shakespeare. There is nothing in imaginative literature 
superior in its own way to the episode of Voltaire in the 
Fritziad. It is delicious in humor, masterly in minute 
characterization. We feel as if the principal victim (for 



136 CAELYLE. 

we cannot help feeling all the while that he is so) of this 
mischievous genius had been put upon the theatre before 
us by some perfect mimic like Foote, who had studied 
his habitual gait, gestures, tones, turn of thought, 
costume, trick of feature, and rendered them with the 
slight dash of caricature needful to make the whole 
composition tell. It is in such things that Mr. Carlyle 
is beyond all rivalry, and that we must go back to Shake- 
speare for a comparison. But the mastery of Shake- 
speare is shown perhaps more strikingly in his treatment 
of the ordinary than of the exceptional. Hi's is the 
gracious equality of Nature herself. Mr. Carlyle's gift 
is rather in the representation than in the evolution of 
character ; and it is a necessity of his art, therefore, to 
exaggerate slightly his heroic, and to caricature in like 
manner his comic parts. His appreciation is l?ss psy- 
chological than physical and external. Grimm relates 
that Garrick, riding once with Preville, proposed to him 
that they should counterfeit drunkenness. They rode 
through Passy accordingly, deceiving all who saw them. 
When beyond the town Preville asked how he had suc- 
ceeded. "Excellently," said Garrick, "as to your body; 
but your legs were not tipsy." Mr. Carlyle would be as 
exact in his observation of nature as the great actor, and 
would make us see a drunken man as well ; but we 
doubt whether he could have conceived that unmatch- 
able scene in Antony and Cleopatra, where the tipsiness 
of Lepidus pervades the whole metaphysical no less 
than the physical part of the triumvir. If his sym- 
pathies bore any proportion to his instinct for catching 
those traits which are the expression of character, but 
not character itself, we might have had a great historian 
in him instead of a history-painter. But that which is 
a main element in Mr. Carlyle's talent, and does perhaps 
more than anything else to make it effective, is a defect 



CARLYLE. 137 

of his nature. The cjmicism which renders him so en- 
tertaining precludes him from any just conception of 
men and their motives, and from any sane estimate of 
the relative importance of the eveiits which concern 
them. We remember a picture of Hamon's, where be- 
fore a Punch's theatre are gathered the wisest of man- 
kind in rapt attention. Socrates sits on a front bench, 
absorbed in the spectacle, and in the corner stands Dante 
making entries in his note-book, Mr. Carlyle as an 
historian leaves us in somewhat such a mood. The 
world is a puppet-show, and when we have watched the 
play out, w T e depart with a half-comic consciousness of 
the futility of all human enterprise, and the ludicrous- 
ness of all man's action and passion on the stage of the 
world. Simple, kindly, blundering Oliver Goldsmith 
was after all wiser, and his Vicar, ideal as Hector and 
not less immortal, is a demonstration of the perennial 
beauty and heroism of the homeliest human nature. 
The cynical view is congenial to certain moods, and is so 
little inconsistent with original nobleness of mind, that 
it is not seldom the acetous fermentation of it ; but it 
is the view of the satirist, not of the historian, and takes 
in but a narrow arc in the circumference of truth. 
C} T nicism in itself is essentially disagreeable. It is the 
intellectual analogue of the truffle ; and though it may 
be very well in giving a relish to thought for certain 
palates, it cannot supply the substance of it. Mr. Car- 
ry le's cynicism is not that polished weariness of the out- 
sides of life which we find in Ecclesiastes. It goes much 
deeper than that to the satisfactions, not of the body or 
the intellect, but of the very soul itself. It vaunts 
itself; it is noisy and aggressive. What the wise master 
puts into the mouth of desperate ambition, thwarted of 
the fruit of its crime, as the fitting expression of pas- 
sionate sophistry, seems to have become an article of his 
creed. With him 



138 CARLYLE. 

" Life is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, 
Signifying nothing." 

He goes about with his Diogenes dark-lantern, professing 
to seek a man, but inwardly resolved to find a monkey. 
He loves to flash it suddenly on poor human nature in 
some ridiculous or degrading posture. He admires still, 
or keeps affirming that he admires, the doughty, silent, 
hard-working men who, like Cromwell, go honestly about 
their business ; but when we come to his later examples, 
we find that it is not loyalty to duty or to an inward 
ideal of high-mindedness that he finds admirable in 
them, but a blind unquestioning vassalage to whomso- 
ever it has pleased him to set up for a hero. He would 
fain replace the old feudalism with a spiritual counter- 
part, in which there shall be an obligation to soul-service. 
He who once popularized the word flunkey by ringing 
the vehement changes of his scorn upon it, is at last 
forced to conceive an ideal flunkeyism to squire the 
hectoring Don Belianises of his fancy about the world. 
Failing this, his latest theory of Divine government 
seems to be the cudgel. Poets have sung all manner of 
vegetable loves ; Petrarch has celebrated the laurel, 
Chaucer the daisy, and Wordsworth the gallows-tree ; it 
remained for the ex-pedagogue of Ecclefechan to become 
the volunteer laureate of the rod, and to imagine a 
world created and directed by a divine Dr. Busby. We 
cannot help thinking that Mr. Carlyle might have 
learned something to his advantage by living a few years 
in the democracy which he scoffs at as heartily a priori 
as if it were the demagogism which Aristophanes derided 
from experience. The Hero, as Mr. Carlyle understands 
him, was a makeshift of the past ; and the ideal of man- 
hood is to be found hereafter in free communities, where 
the state shall at length sum up and exemplify in itself 



CARLYLE. 139 

all those qualities which poets were forced to imagine 
and typify because they could not find them in the 
actual world. 

In the earlier part of his literary career, Mr. Carlyle 
was the denouncer of shams, the preacher up of sincer- 
ity, manliness, and of a living faith, instead of a dron- 
ing ritual. He had intense convictions, and he made 
disciples. With a compass of diction unequalled by any 
other public performer of the time, ranging as it did 
from the unbooked freshness of the Scottish peasant to 
the most far-sought phrase of 'literary curiosity, with 
humor, pathos, and eloquence at will, it was no wonder 
that he found eager listeners in a world longing for a 
sensation, and forced to put up with the West-End 
gospel of " Pelham." If not a profound thinker, he had 
what was next best, — he felt profoundly, and his cry 
came out of the depths. The stern Calvinism of his 
early training was rekindled by his imagination to the 
old fervor of Wishart and Brown, and became a new 
phenomenon as he reproduced it subtilized by German 
transcendentalism and German culture. Imagination, 
if it lays hold of a Scotchman, possesses him in the old 
demoniac sense of the word, and that hard logical 
nature, if the Hebrew fire once gets fair headway in it, 
burns unquenchable as an anthracite coal-mine. But to 
utilize these sacred heats, to emplo}^ them, as a literary 
man is always tempted, to keep the domestic pot a-boil- 
ing, — is such a thing possible % Only too possible, we 
fear ; and Mr. Carlyle is an example of it. If the Ian-, 
guid public long for a sensation, the excitement of 
making one becomes also a necessity of the successful 
author, as the intellectual nerves grow duller and the 
old inspiration that came unbidden to the bare garret 
grows shier and shier of the comfortable parlor. As he 
himself said thirty years ago of Edward Irving, " Un- 



140 CARLYLE. 

consciously, for the most part in deep unconsciousness, 
there was now the impossibility to live neglected, — to 
walk on the quiet paths where alone it is well with us. 
Singularity must henceforth succeed singularity. 
foulest Circean draught, thou poison of Popular Ap- 
plause ! madness is in thee and death ; thy end is 
Bedlam and the grave." Mr. Carlyle won his first suc- 
cesses as a kind of preacher in print. His fervor, his 
oddity of manner, his pugnacious paradox, drew the 
crowd ; the truth, or, at any rate, the faith that under- 
lay them all, brought also the fitter audience, though 
fewer. But the curse was upon him ; he must attract, 
he must astonish. Thenceforth he has done nothing 
but revamp his telling things ; but the oddity has be- 
come always odder, the paradoxes more paradoxical. 
No very large share of truth falls to the apprehension 
of any one man ; let him keep it sacred, and beware of 
repeating it till it turn to falsehood on his lips by he-- 
coming ritual. Truth always has a bewitching savor of 
newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that 
original sweetness to the tongue ; but alas for him who 
would make the one a substitute for the other ! We 
seem to miss of late in Mr. Carlyle the old sincerity. 
He has become the purely literary man, less concerned 
about what he says than about how he shall say it to 
best advantage. The Muse should be the companion, 
not the guide, says he whom Mr. Carlyle has pronounced 
"the wisest of this generation." What would be a 
virtue in the poet is a vice of the most fatal kind in the 
teacher, and, alas that we should say it ! the very Draco 
of shams, whose code contained no penalty milder than 
capital for the most harmless of them, has become at 
last something very like a sham himself. Mr. Carlyle 
continues to be a voice crying in the wilderness, but no 
longer a voice with any earnest conviction behind it. 



CAELYLE. 141 

Hearing him rebuke us for being humbugs and impos- 
tors, we are inclined to answer, with the ambassador of 
Philip II. , when his master reproached him with for- 
getting substance in ceremony, " Your Majesty forgets 
that you are only a ceremony yourself." And Mr. Car- 
lyle's teaching, moreover, — if teaching we may call it, 
• — belongs to what the great German, whose disciple he 
is, condemned as the "literature of despair." An apostle 
to the gentiles might hope for some fruit of his preach- 
ing ; but of what avail an apostle who shouts his 
message down the mouth of the pit to poor lost souls, 
whom he can positively assure only that it is impossible 
to get out 1 Mr. Carlyle lights up the lanterns of his 
Pharos after the ship is already rolling between the 
tongue of the sea and the grinders of the reef. It is 
very brilliant, and its revolving flashes touch the crests 
of the breakers with an awful picturesqueness ; but in 
so desperate a state of things, even Dr. Syntax might 
be pardoned for being forgetful of the picturesque. The 
Toryism of Scott sprang from love of the past ; that of 
Carlyle is far more dangerously infectious, for it is logi- 
cally deduced from a deep disdain of human nature. 

Browning has drawn a beautiful picture of an old king 
sitting at the gate of his palace to judge his people in 
the calm sunshine of that past which never existed out- 
side a poet's brain. It is the sweetest of waking dreams, 
this of absolute power and perfect wisdom in one su- 
preme ruler; but it is as pure a creation of human 
want and weakness, as clear a witness of mortal limita- 
tion and incompleteness, as the shoes of swiftness, the 
cloak of darkness, the purse of Fortunatus, and the 
elixir vitce. It is the natural refuge of imaginative tem- 
peraments impatient of our blunders and shortcomings, 
and, given a complete man, all would submit to the 
divine right of his despotism. But alas ! to every the 



142 CARLYLE. 

most fortunate human birth hobbles up that malign fairy 
who has been forgotten, with her fatal gift of imperfec- 
tion ! So far as our experience has gone, it has been the 
very opposite of Mr. Carlyle's. Instead of finding men 
disloyal to their natural leader, nothing has ever seemed 
to us so touching as the gladness with which they follow 
him, when they are sure they have found him at last. 
But a natural leader of the ideal type is not to be looked 
for nisi digitus vindice nodus. The Divine Forethought 
had been cruel in furnishing one for every petty occa- 
sion, and thus thwarting in all inferior men that price- 
less gift of reason, to develop which, and to make it one 
w T ith free-will, is the highest use of our experience on 
earth. Mr. Carlyle was hard bestead and very far gone 
in his idolatry of mere pluck, when he was driven to 
choose Friedrich as a hero. A poet — and Mr. Carlyle 
is nothing else — is unwise who yokes Pegasus to a pro- 
saic theme which no force of wing can lift from the dull 
earth. Charlemagne would have been a wiser choice, 
far enough in the past for ideal treatment, more mani- 
festly the Siegfried of Anarchy, and in his rude way the 
refounder of that empire which is the ideal of despotism 
in the Western world. 

Friedrich was doubtless a remarkable man, but surely 
very far below any lofty standard of heroic greatness. 
He was the last of the European kings who could look 
upon his kingdom as his private patrimony ; and it was 
this estate of his, this piece of property, which he so 
obstinately and successfully defended. He had no idea 
of country as it was understood by an ancient Greek or 
Roman, as it is understood by a modern Englishman or 
American ; and there is something almost pitiful in see- 
ing a man of genius like Mr. Carlyle fighting painfully 
over again those battles of the last century which settled 
nothing but the continuance of the Prussian monarchy, 



CAELYLE. 143 

while he saw only the " burning of a dirty chimney " in 
the war which a great people was waging under his very 
eyes for the idea of nationality and orderly magistrature, 
and which fixed, let us hope forever, a boundary-line on 
the map of history and man's advancement toward self- 
conscious and responsible freedom. The true historical 
genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler 
meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is 
he who detects the divine in the casual ; and we some- 
what suspect the depth of his insight into the past, who 
cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that dis- 
guise in which it always visits us. Shall we hint to Mr. 
Carlyle that a man may look on an heroic age, as well as 
an heroic master, with the eyes of a valet, as misappre- 
ciative certainly, though not so ignoble 1 

What Goethe says of a great poet, that he must be a 
citizen of his age as well as of his country, may be said 
inversely of a great king. He should be a citizen of his 
country as well as of his age. Friedrich was certainly 
the latter in its fullest sense ; whether he was, or could 
have been, the former, in any sense, may be doubted. 
The man who spoke and wrote French in preference 
to his mother-tongue, who, dying when Goethe was 
already drawing toward his fortieth year, Schiller toward 
his thirtieth, and Lessing had been already five years in 
his grave, could yet see nothing but barbarism in Ger- 
man literature, had little of the old Teutonic fibre in his 
nature. The man who pronounced the Nibelungen Lied 
not worth a pinch of priming, had little conception of 
the power of heroic traditions in making heroic men, and 
especially in strengthening that instinct made up of so 
many indistinguishable associations which we call love 
of country. Charlemagne, when he caused the old songs 
of his people to be gathered and written down, showed a 
truer sense of the sources of national feeling and a 



144 CARLYLE. 

deeper political insight. This want of sympathy points 
to the somewhat narrow limits of Friedrich's nature. 
In spite of Mr. Carlyle's adroit statement of the case, 
and the whole book has an air of being the plea of 
a masterly advocate in mitigation of sentence, we feel 
that his hero was essentially hard, narrow, and selfish. 
His popularity will go for little with any one who has 
studied the trifling and often fabulous elements that 
make up that singular compound. A bluntness of speech, 
a shabby uniform, a frugal camp equipage, a timely 
familiarity, may make a man the favorite of an army or 
a nation, — above all, if he have the knack of success. 
Moreover, popularity is much more easily won from 
above downward, and is bought at a better bargain by 
kings and generals than by other men. We doubt if 
Friedrich would have been liked as a private person, or 
even as an unsuccessful king. He apparently attached 
very few people to himself, fewer even than his brutal 
old Squire Western of a father. His sister Wilhelmina 
is j)erhaps an exception. We say perhaps, for we do not 
know how much the heroic part he was called on to 
play had to do with the matter, and whether sisterly 
pride did not pass even with herself for sisterly affection. 
Moreover she was far from him ; and Mr. Carlyle waves 
aside, in his generous fashion, some rather keen com- 
ments of hers on her brothers character when she visited 
Berlin after he had become king. Indeed, he is apt 
to deal rather contemptuously with all adverse criticism 
of his hero. We sympathize with his impulse in this re- 
spect, agreeing heartily as we do in Chaucer's scorn of 
those who " glodlie demen to the baser end" in such 
matters. But we are not quite sure if this be a safe 
method with the historian. He must doubtless be the 
friend of his hero if he would understand him, but he 
must be more the friend of truth if he would understand 



CARLYLE. 145 

history. Mr. Carlyle's passion for truth is intense. 
as befits his temper, but it is that of a lover for his 
mistress. He would have her all to himself, and has 
a lover's conviction that no one is able, or even fit, to 
appreciate her but himself. He does well to despise the 
tittle-tattle of vulgar minds, but surely should not ig- 
nore all testimony on the other side. For ourselves, we 
think it not unimportant that Goethe's friend Knebel, a 
man not incapable of admiration, and who had served a 
dozen years or so as an officer of Friedrich's guard, 
should have bluntly called him "the tyrant." 

Mr. Carlyle's history traces the family of his hero 
down from its beginnings in the picturesque chiaro-scuro 
of the Middle Ages. It was an able and above all a 
canny house, a Scotch version of the word able, which 
implies thrift and an eye to the main chance, the said 
main chance or chief end of man being altogether of 
this world. Friedrich, inheriting this family faculty in 
full measure, was driven, partly by ambition, partly by 
necessity, to apply it to war. He did so, with the 
success to be expected where a man of many expedients 
has the good luck to be opposed by men with few. He 
adds another to the many proofs that it is possible to be 
a great general without a spark of that divine fire which 
we call genius, and that good fortune in war results from 
the same prompt talent and unbending temper which 
lead to the same result in the peaceful professions. 
Friedrich had certainly more of the temperament of 
genius than Marlborough or Wellington ; but not to go 
beyond modern instances, he does not impress us with 
the massive breadth of Napoleon, nor attract us with 
the climbing ardor of Turenne. To compare him with 
Alexander or Caesar were absurd. The kingship that 
was in him, and which won Mr. Carlyle to be his biogra- 
pher, is that of will merely, of rapid and relentless 
7 j 



146 CAELYLE. 

command. For organization he had a masterly talent ; 
but he could not apply it to the arts of peace, both be- 
cause he wanted experience and because the rash decision 
of the battle-field will not serve in matters which are 
governed by natural laws of growth. He seems, indeed, 
to have had a coarse, soldier's contempt for all civil dis- 
tinction, altogether unworthy of a wise king, or even 
of a prudent one. He confers the title of Hofrath on 
the husband of a woman with whom his General Wal- 
rave is living in what Mr. Carlyle justly calls " brutish 
polygamy," and this at Walrave's request, on the ground 
1 hat " a general's drab ought to have a handle to her 
i-ame." Mr. Carlyle murmurs in a mild parenthesis that 
"we rather regret this" ! (Vol. III. p. 559.) This is 
his usual way of treating unpleasant matters, sidling by 
with a deprecating shrug of the shoulders. Not that 
he ever w T ilfully suppresses anything. On the contrary, 
there is no greater proof of his genius than the way in 
which, while he seems to paint a character with all its 
disagreeable traits, he contrives to win our sympathy for 
it, nay, almost our liking. This is conspicuously true 
of his portrait of Friedrich's father ; and that he does 
not succeed in making Friedrich himself attractive is a 
strong argument with us that the fault is in the subject 
and not the artist. 

The book, we believe, has been comparatively unsuc- 
cessful as a literary venture. Nor do we wonder at it. 
It is disproportionately long, and too much made up of 
those descriptions of battles to read which seems even 
more difficult than to have won the victory itself, more 
disheartening than to have suffered the defeat. To an 
American, also, the warfare seemed Liliputian in the 
presence of a conflict so much larger in its proportions 
and significant in its results. The interest, moreover, 
flags decidedly toward the close, where the reader cannot 



CARLYLE. 147 

help feeling that the author loses breath somewhat pain- 
fully under the effort of so prolonged a course. Mr. 
Carlyle has evidently devoted to his task a labor that 
may be justly called prodigious. Not only has he sifted 
all the German histories and memoirs, but has visited 
every battle-field, and describes them with an eye for 
country that is without rival among historians. The 
book is evidently an abridgment of even more abundant 
collections, and yet as it stands the matter overburdens 
the work. It is a bundle of lively episodes rather than 
a continuous narrative. In this respect it contrasts 
oddly with the concinnity of his own earlier Life of 
Schiller. But the episodes are lively, the humor and 
pathos spring from a profound nature, the sketches of 
character are masterly, the seizure of every picturesque 
incident infallible, and the literary judgments those of a 
thorough scholar and critic. There is, of course, the 
usual amusing objurgation of Dryasdust and his rubbish- 
heaps, x ,he usual assumption of omniscience, and the 
usual certainty of the lively French lady of being al- 
ways in the right ; yet we cannot help thinking that a 
little of Dryasdust's plodding exactness would have saved 
Fouquet eleven years of the imprisonment to which Mr. 
Carlyle condemns him, would have referred us to St. 
Simon rather than to Voltaire for the character of the 
brothers Belle-Ile, and would have kept clear of a 
certain ludicrous etymology of the name Antwerp, not 
to mention some other trifling slips of the like nature. 
In conclusion, after saying, as honest critics must, that 
" The History of Friedrich II. called Frederick the 
Great " is a book to be read in with more satisfaction 
than to be read through, after declaring that it is open 
to all manner of criticism, especially in point of moral 
purpose and tendency, we must admit with thankful- 
ness, that it has the one prime merit of being the work 



148 CARLYLE. 

of a man who has every quality of a great poet except 
that supreme one of rhythm which shapes both matter 
and manner to harmonious proportion, and that where 
it is good, it is good as only genius knows how to be. 

With the gift of song, Carlyle would have been the 
greatest of epic poets since Homer. Without it, to 
modulate and harmonize and bring parts into their 
proper relation, he is the most amorphous of humorists, 
the most shining avatar of whim the world has ever seen. 
Beginning with a hearty contempt for shams, he has 
come at length to believe in brute force as the only 
reality, and has as little sense of justice as Thackeray 
allowed to women. We say brute force because, though 
the theory is that this force should be directed by the 
supreme intellect for the time being, yet all inferior wits 
are treated rather as obstacles to be contemptuously 
shoved aside than as ancillary forces to be conciliated 
through their reason. But, with all deductions, he re- 
mains the profoundest critic and the most dramatic imagi- 
nation of modern times. Never was there a more striking 
example of that ingenium perfervidum long ago said to be 
characteristic of his countrymen. His is one of the 
natures, rare in these latter centuries, capable of rising 
to a white heat ; but once fairly kindled, he is like a 
three-decker on fire, and his shotted guns go off, as the 
glow reaches them, alike dangerous to friend or foe. 
Though he seems more and more to confound material 
with moral success, yet there is always something whole- 
some in his unswerving loyalty to reality, as he under- 
stands it. History, in the true sense, he does not and 
cannot write, for he looks on mankind as a herd without 
volition, and without moral force ; but such vivid pic- 
tures of events, such living conceptions of character, we 
find nowhere else in prose. The figures of most histo- 
rians seem like dolls stuffed with bran, whose whole sub- 



CARLYLE. 149 

stance runs out through any hole that criticism may 
tear in them, but Carlyle's are so real in comparison, 
that, if you prick them, they bleed. He seems a little 
wearied, here and there, in his Friedrich, with the mul- 
tiplicity of detail, and does his filling-in rather shabbily ; 
but he still remains in his own way, like his hero, the 
Only, and such episodes as that of Voltaire would make 
the fortune of any other writer. Though not the safest 
of guides in politics or practical philosophy, his value as 
an inspirer and awakener cannot be over-estimated. It 
is a power which belongs only to the highest order of 
minds, for it is none but a divine fire that can so kindle 
and irradiate. The debt due him from those who lis- 
tened to the teachings of his prime for revealing to them 
what sublime reserves of power even the humblest may 
find in manliness, sincerity, and self-reliance, can be paid 
with nothing short of reverential gratitude. As a puri- 
fier of the sources whence our intellectual inspiration is 
drawn, his influence has been second only to that of 
Wordsworth, if even to his. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN, 

1864. 



THERE have been many painful crises since the im- 
patient vanity of South Carolina hurried ten pros- 
perous Commonwealths into a crime whose assured ret- 
ribution was to leave them either at the mercy of the 
nation they had wronged, or of the anarchy they had 
summoned but could not control, when no thoughtful 
American opened his morning paper without dreading to 
find that he had no longer a country to love and honor. 
Whatever the result of the convulsion whose first shocks 
were beginning to be felt, there would still be enough 
square miles of earth for elbow-room ; but that ineffable 
sentiment made up of memory and hope, of instinct and 
tradition, which swells every man's heart and shapes his 
thought, though perhaps never present to his conscious- 
ness, would be gone from it, leaving it common earth 
and nothing more. Men might gather rich crops from 
it, but that ideal harvest of priceless associations would 
be reaped no longer ; that fine virtue which sent up 
messages of courage and security from every sod of 
it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be 
irrevocably cut off from our past, and be forced to splice 
the ragged ends of our lives upon whatever new con- 
ditions chance might leave dangling for us. 

We confess that we had our doubts at first whether 
the patriotism of our people were not too narrowly pro- 
vincial to embrace the proportions of national peril. 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 151 

We felt an only too natural distrust of immense public 
meetings and enthusiastic cheers. 

That a reaction should follow the holiday enthusiasm 
with which the war was entered-on, that it should follow 
soon, and that the slackening of public spirit should 
be proportionate to the previous over-tension, might well 
be foreseen by all who had studied human nature or 
history. Men acting gregariously are always in ex- 
tremes ; as they are one moment capable of higher 
courage, so they are liable, the next, to baser depression, 
and it is often a matter of chance whether numbers shall 
multiply confidence or discouragement. Nor does de- 
ception lead more surely to distrust of men, than self- 
deception to suspicion of principles. The only faith that 
wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that 
which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp 
mordant of experience. Enthusiasm is good material 
for the orator, but the statesman needs something more 
durable to work in, — must be able to rely on the delib- 
erate reason and consequent firmness of the people, with- 
out which that presence of mind, no less essential in 
times of moral than of material peril, will be wanting at 
the critical moment. Would this fervor of the Free 
States hold out 1 Was it kindled by a just feeling of the 
value of constitutional liberty 1 Had it body enough to 
withstand the inevitable dampening of checks, reverses, 
delays] Had our population intelligence enough to 
comprehend that the choice was between order and anar- 
chy, between the equilibrium of a government by law 
and the tussle of misrule by promincia?nie)ito ? Could a 
war be maintained without the ordinary stimulus of 
hatred and plunder, and with the impersonal loyalty of 
principle 1 These were serious questions, and with no 
precedent to aid in answering them. 

At the beginning of the war there was, indeed, occa- 



152 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

sion for the most anxious apprehension. A President 
known to be infected with the political heresies, and 
suspected of sympathy with the treason, of the Southern 
conspirators, had just surrendered the reins, we will not 
say of power, but of chaos, to a successor known only as 
the representative of a party whose leaders, with long 
training in opposition, had none in the conduct of affairs; 
an empty treasury was called on to supply resources 
beyond precedent in the history of finance ; the trees 
were yet growing and the iron unmined with which a 
navy was to be built and armored ; officers without dis- 
cipline were to make a mob into an army ; and, above 
all, the public opinion of Europe, echoed and reinforced 
with eveiy vague hint and every specious argument of 
despondency by a powerful faction at home, was either 
contemptuously sceptical or actively hostile. It would 
be hard to over-estimate the force of this latter element 
of disintegration and discouragement among a people 
where every citizen at home, and eveiy soldier in the 
field, is a reader of newspapers. The pedlers of rumor 
in the North were the most effective allies of the re- 
bellion. A nation can be liable to no more insidious 
treachery than that of the telegraph, sending hourly its 
electric thrill of panic along the remotest nerves of the 
community, till the excited imagination makes every 
real danger loom heightened with its unreal double. 

And even if we look only at more palpable difficulties, 
the problem to be solved by our civil war was so vast, 
both in its immediate relations and its future conse- 
quences ; the conditions of its solution were so intricate 
and so greatly dependent on incalculable and uncontrol- 
lable contingencies ; so many of the data, whether for 
hope or fear, were, from their novelty, incapable of 
arrangement under any of the categories of historical 
precedent, that there were moments of crisis when the 



K^> 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 15 

firmest believer in the strength and sufficiency of the 
democratic theory of government might well hold his 
breath in vague apprehension of disaster. Our teachers 
of political philosophy, solemnly arguing from the pre- 
cedent of some petty Grecian, Italian, or Flemish city, 
whose long periods of aristocracy were broken now and 
then by awkward parentheses of mob, had always taught 
us that democracies were incapable of the sentiment of 
loyalty, of concentrated and prolonged effort, of far-reach- 
ing conceptions ; were absorbed in material interests ; im- 
patient of regular, and much more of exceptional restraint; 
had no natural nucleus of gravitation, nor any forces but 
centrifugal ; were always on the verge of civil war, and 
slunk at last into the natural almshouse of bankrupt 
popular government, a military despotism. Here was 
indeed a dreary outlook for persons who knew democ- 
racy, not by rubbing shoulders with it lifelong, but 
merely from books, and America only by the report of 
some fellow-Briton, who, having eaten a bad dinner or 
lost a carpet-bag here, had written to the Times demand- 
ing redress, and drawing a mournful inference of demo- 
cratic instability. Nor were men wanting among our- 
selves who had so steeped their brains in London 
literature as to mistake Cockneyism for European cul- 
ture, and contempt of their country for cosmopolitan 
breadth of view, and who, owing all they had and all 
they were to democracy, thought it had an air of high- 
breeding to join in the shallow epicedium that our bub- 
ble had burst. 

But beside any disheartening influences which might 
affect the timid or the despondent, there were reasons 
enough of settled gravity against any over-confidence of 
hope. A war — which, whether we consider the expanse 
of the territory at stake, the hosts brought into the field, 
or the reach of the principles involved, may fairly be 
7* 



154 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

reckoned the most momentous of modern times — was 
to be waged by a people divided at home, unnerved by 
fifty years of peace, under a chief magistrate without ex- 
perience and without reputation, whose every measure 
was sure to be cunningly hampered by a jealous and 
unscrupulous minority, and who, while dealing with un- 
heard-of complications at home, must soothe a hostile 
neutrality abroad, waiting only a pretext to become war. 
All this was to be done without warning and without 
preparation, while at the same time a social revolution 
was to be accomplished in the political condition of four 
millions of people, by softening the prejudices, allaying 
the fears, and gradually obtaining the co-operation, of 
their unwilling liberators. Surely, if ever there were an 
occasion when the heightened imagination of the histo- 
rian might see Destiny visibly intervening in human 
affairs, here was a knot worthy of her shears. Never, 
perhaps, was any system of government tried by so con- 
tinuous and searching a strain as ours during the last 
three years ; never has any shown itself stronger ; and 
never could that strength be so directly traced to the 
virtue and intelligence of the people, — to that general 
enlightenment and prompt efficiency of public opinion 
possible only under the influence of a political framework 
like our own. We find it hard to understand how even 
a foreigner should be blind to the grandeur of the com- 
bat of ideas that has been going on here, — to the heroic 
energy, persistency, and self-reliance of a nation proving 
that it knows how much dearer greatness is than mere 
power ; and we own that it is impossible for us to con- 
ceive the mental and moral condition of the American 
who does not feel his spirit braced and heightened by 
being even a spectator of such qualities and achieve- 
ments. That a steady purpose and a definite aim have 
been given to the jarring forces which, at the beginning 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 155 

of the war, spent themselves in the discussion of schemes 
which could only become operative, if at all, after the 
war was over ; that a popular excitement has been 
slowly intensified into an earnest national will ; that 
a somewhat impracticable moral sentiment has been 
made the unconscious instrument of a practical moral 
end ; that the treason of covert enemies, the jealousy of 
rivals, the unwise zeal of friends, have been made not 
only useless for mischief, but even useful for good ; that 
the conscientious sensitiveness of England to the horrors 
of civil conflict has been prevented from complicating a 
domestic with a foreign war ; — all these results, any 
one of which might suffice to prove greatness in a ruler, 
have been mainly due to the good sense, the good- 
humor, the sagacity, the large-mindedness, and the un- 
selfish honesty of the unknown man whom a blind for- 
tune, as it seemed, had lifted from the crowd to the 
most dangerous and difficult eminence of modern times. 
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the 
native metal of a man is tested ; it is by the sagacity to 
see, and the fearless honesty to admit, whatever of truth 
there may be in an adverse opinion, in order more con- 
vincingly to expose the fallacy that lurks behind it, that 
a reasoner at length gains for his mere statement of a 
fact, the force of argument ; it is by a wise forecast 
which allows hostile combinations to go so far as by the 
inevitable reaction to become elements of his own power, 
that a politician proves his genius for state-craft ; and 
especially it is by so gently guiding public sentiment 
that he seems to follow it, by so yielding doubtful points 
that he can be firm without seeming obstinate in essen- 
tial ones, and thus gain the advantages of compromise 
without the weakness of concession ; by so instinctively 
comprehending the temper and prejudices of a people as 
to make them gradually conscious of the superior wisdom 



156 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

of his freedom from temper and prejudice, — it is by 
qualities such as these that a magistrate shows himself 
worthy to be chief in a commonwealth of freemen. And 
it is for qualities such as these that we firmly believe 
History will rank Mr. Lincoln among the most prudent 
of statesmen and the most successful of rulers. If we 
wish to appreciate him, we have only to conceive the in- 
evitable chaos in wdiich we should now be weltering, had 
a weak man or an unwise one been chosen in his stead. 

" Bare is back," says the Norse proverb, " without 
brother behind it " ; and this is, by analogy, true of an 
elective magistracy. The hereditary ruler in any critical 
emergency may reckon on the inexhaustible resources of 
prestige, of sentiment, of superstition, of dependent in- 
terest, while the new man must slowly and painfully 
create all these out of the unwilling material around 
him, by superiority of character, by patient singleness 
of purpose, by sagacious presentiment of popular ten- 
dencies and instinctive sympathy with the national char- 
acter. Mr. Lincoln's task was one of peculiar and 
exceptional difficulty. Long habit had accustomed the 
American people to the notion of a party in power, and 
of a President as its creature and organ, while the more 
vital fact, that the executive for the time being repre- 
sents the abstract idea of government as a permanent 
principle superior to all party and all private interest, 
had gradually become unfamiliar. They had so long 
seen the public policy more or less directed by views of 
party, and often even of personal advantage, as to be 
ready to suspect the motives of a chief magistrate com- 
pelled, for the first time in our history, to feel himself 
the head and hand of a great nation, and to act upon, 
the fundamental maxim, laid down by all publicists, 
that the first duty of a government is to defend and 
maintain its own existence. Accordingly, a powerful 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. ' 157 

weapon seemed to be put into the hands of the opposi- 
tion by the necessity under which the administration 
found itself of applying this old truth to new relations. 
Nor were the opposition his only nor his most dangerous 
opponents. 

The Republicans had carried the country upon an 
issue in which ethics were more directly and visibly 
mingled with politics than usual. Their leaders were 
trained to a method of oratory which relied for its ef- 
fect rather on the moral sense than the understanding. 
Their arguments were drawn, not so much from experi- 
ence as from general principles of right and wrong. 
When the war came, their system continued to be ap- 
plicable and effective, for here again the reason of the 
people was to be reached and kindled through their sen- 
timents. It was one of those periods of excitement, 
gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last, 
exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere 
words country, human rights, democracy, a meaning and 
a force beyond that of sober and logical argument. 
They were convictions, maintained and defended by the 
supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in 
and roused those primary instincts that make their lair 
in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called 
the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable 
something which may be, according to circumstances, 
the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But 
enthusiasm, once cold, can never be warmed over into 
anything better than cant, — and phrases, when once 
the inspiration that filled them with beneficent power 
has ebbed away, retain only that semblance of meaning 
which enables them to supplant reason in hasty minds. 
Among the lessons taught by the French Revolution 
there is none sadder or more striking than this, that you 
may make everything else out of the passions of men 



158 • ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

except a political system that will work, and that there 
is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sin- 
cerity formulated into dogma. It is always demoralizing 
to extend the domain of sentiment over questions where 
it has no legitimate jurisdiction ; and perhaps the 
severest strain upon Mr. Lincoln was in resisting a ten- 
dency of his own supporters which chimed with his own 
private desires while wholly opposed to his convictions 
of what would be wise policy. 

The change which three years have brought about is 
too remarkable to be passed over without comment, too 
weighty in its lesson not to be laid to heart. Never did 
a President enter upon office with less means at his 
command, outside his own strength of heart and steadi- 
ness of understanding, for inspiring confidence in the 
people, and so winning it for himself, than Mr. Lincoln. 
All that was known of him was that he was a good 
stump-speaker, nominated for his availability, — that is, 
because he had no history, — and chosen by a party with 
whose more extreme opinions he was not in sympathy. 
It might well be feared that a man past fifty, against 
whom the ingenuity of hostile partisans could rake up 
no accusation, must be lacking in manliness of charac- 
ter, in decision of principle, in strength of will ; that 
a man who was at best only the representative of a 
party, and who yet did not fairly represent even that, 
would fail of political, much more of popular, support. 
And certainly no one ever entered upon office w T ith so 
few resources of power in the past, and so many mate- 
rials of weakness in the present, as Mr. Lincoln. Even 
in that half of the Union which acknowledged him as 
President, there was a large, and at that time dangerous 
minority, that hardly admitted his claim to the office, 
and even in the party that elected him there w T as also a 
large minority that suspected him of being secretly a 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 159 

communicant with the church of Laodicea. All that he 
did was sure to be virulently attacked as ultra by one 
side ; all that he left undone, to be stigmatized as proof 
of lukewarmness and backsliding by the other. Mean- 
while he was to carry on a truly colossal war by means 
of both ; he was to disengage the country from diplo- 
matic entanglements of unprecedented peril undisturbed 
by the help or the hinderance of either, and to win from 
the crowning dangers of his administration, in the con- 
fidence of the people, the means of his safety and their 
own. He has contrived to do it, and perhaps none of 
our Presidents since Washington has stood so firm in 
the confidence of the people as he does after three years 
of stormy administration. 

Mr. Lincoln's policy was a tentative one, and rightly 
so. He laid down no programme which must compel 
him to be either inconsistent or unwise, no cast-iron 
theorem to which circumstances must be fitted as they 
rose, or else be useless to his ends. He seemed to have 
chosen Mazarms motto, Le temps et moi. The moi, to 
be sure, was not very prominent at first; but it has 
grown more and more so, till the world is beginning to 
be persuaded that it stands for a character of marked 
individuality and capacity for affairs. Time was his 
prime-minister, and, we began to think, at one period, 
his general-in-chief also. At first he was so slow that 
he tired out all those who see no evidence of progress 
but in blowing up the engine ; then he was so fast, that 
he took the breath away from those who think there is 
no getting on safely while there is a spark of fire under 
the boilers. God is the only being who has time enough ; 
but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, 
can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs. 
Mr. Lincoln, as it seems to us in reviewing his career, 
though we have sometimes in our impatience thought 



160 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

otherwise, has always waited, as a wise man should, till 
the right moment brought up all his reserves. Semper 
nocuit differre paratis, is a sound axiom, but the really 
efficacious man will also be sure to know when he is not 
ready, and be firm against all persuasion and reproach 
till- he is. 

One would be apt to think, from some of the criticisms 
made on Mr. Lincoln's course by those who mainly agree 
with him in principle, that the chief object of a states- 
man should be rather to proclaim his adhesion to certain 
doctrines, than to achieve their triumph by quietly ac- 
complishing his ends. In our opinion, there is no more 
unsafe politician than a conscientiously rigid doctrinaire, 
nothing more sure to end in disaster than a theoretic 
scheme of policy that admits of no pliability for contin- 
gencies. True, there is a popular image of an impossi- 
ble He, in whose plastic hands the submissive destinies 
of mankind become as wax, and to whose commanding 
necessity the toughest facts yield with the graceful 
pliancy of fiction ; but in real life we commonly find 
that the men who control circumstances, as it is called, 
are those who have learned to allow for the influence of 
their eddies, and have the nerve to turn them to account 
at the happy instant. Mr. Lincoln's perilous task has 
been to carry a rather shaky raft through the rapids, 
making fast the unrulier logs as he could snatch oppor- 
tunity, and the country is to be congratulated that he 
did not think it his duty to run straight at all hazards, 
but cautiously to assure himself with his setting-pole 
where the main current was, and keep steadily to that. 
He is still in wild water, but we have faith that his skill 
and sureness of eye will bring him out right at last. 

A curious, and, as we think, not inapt parallel, might 
be drawn between Mr. Lincoln and one of the most 
striking figures in modern history, — Henry IV. of 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 161 

France. The career of the latter may be more pictur- 
esque, as that of a daring captain always is ; but in all 
its vicissitudes there is nothing more romantic than that 
sudden change, as by a rub of Aladdin's lamp, from the 
attorney's office in a country town of Illinois to the helm 
of a great nation in times like these. The analogy 
between the characters and circumstances of the two 
men is in many respects singularly close. Succeeding to 
a rebellion rather than a crown, Henry's chief material 
dependence was the Huguenot paily, whose doctrines 
sat upon him with a looseness distasteful certainly, if 
not suspicious, to the more fanatical among them. King 
only in name over the greater part of France, and w 7 ith 
his capital barred against him, it yet gradually became 
clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party 
that he w T as the only centre of order and legitimate 
authority round which France could reorganize itself. 
While preachers who held the divine right of kings made 
the churches of Paris ring with declamations in favor of 
democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog of a 
Bearnois, — much as our soi-disant Democrats have 
lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and 
denouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence, — Henry bore both parties in hand till he was 
convinced that only one course of action could possibly 
combine his own interests and those of France. Mean- 
while the Protestants believed somewhat doubtfully that 
he was theirs, the Catholics hoped somewhat doubtfully 
that he would be theirs, and Henry himself turned aside 
remonstrance, advice, and curiosity alike with a jest 
or a proverb (if a little high, he liked them none the 
worse), joking continually as his manner was. We have 
seen Mr. Lincoln contemptuously compared to Sancho 
Panza by persons incapable of appreciating one of the 
deepest pieces of wisdom in the profoundest romance 

K 



162 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

ever written ; namely, that, while Don Quixote was 
incomparable in theoretic and ideal statesmanship, San- 
cho, with his stock of proverbs, the ready money of 
human experience, made the best possible practical 
governor. Henry IV. was as full of wise saws and 
modern instances as Mr. Lincoln, but beneath all this 
was the thoughtful, practical, humane, and thoroughly 
earnest man, around whom the fragments of France 
were to gather themselves till she took her place again 
as a planet of the first magnitude in the European sys- 
tem. In one respect Mr. Lincoln was more fortunate 
than Henry. However some may think him wanting in 
zeal, the most fanatical can find no taint of apostasy 
in any measure of his, nor can the most bitter charge 
him with being influenced by motives of personal in- 
terest. The leading distinction between the policies of 
the two is one of circumstances. Henry went over to 
the nation ; Mr. Lincoln has steadily drawn the nation 
over to him. One left a united France ; the other, we 
hope and believe, will leave a reunited America. We 
leave our readers to trace the further points of difference 
and resemblance for themselves, merely suggesting a 
general similarity which has often occurred to us. One 
only point of melancholy interest we will allow ourselves 
to touch upon. That Mr. Lincoln is not handsome nor 
elegant, we learn from certain English tourists who 
would consider similar revelations in regard to Queen 
Victoria as thoroughly American in their want of bien- 
seance. It is no concern of ours, nor does it affect his fit- 
ness for the high place he so worthily occupies ; but he 
is certainly as fortunate as Henry in the matter of good 
looks, if we may trust contemporary evidence. Mr. 
Lincoln has also been reproached with Americanism by 
some not unfriendly British critics ; but, w T ith all defer- 
ence, we cannot say that we like him any the worse for 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 163 

it, or see in it any reason why he should govern Ameri- 
cans the less wisely. 

People of more sensitive organizations may be shocked, 
but we are glad that in this our true war of indepen- 
dence, which is to free us forever from the Old World, 
we have had at the head of our affairs a man whom 
America made, as God made Adam, out of the very 
earth, unancestried, unprivileged, unknown, to show us 
how much truth, how much magnanimity, and how much 
statecraft await the call of opportunity in simple man- 
hood when it believes in the justice of God and the 
worth of man. Conventionalities are all very well in 
their proper place, but they shrivel at the touch of 
nature like stubble in the fire. The genius that sways 
a nation by its arbitrary will seems less august to us 
than that which multiplies and reinforces itself in the 
instincts and convictions of an entire people. Autocracy 
may have something in it more melodramatic than this, 
but falls far short of it in human value and interest. 

Experience would have bred in us a rooted distrust of 
improvised statesmanship, even if we did not believe 
politics to be a science, which, if it cannot always com- 
mand men of special aptitude and great powers, at least 
demands the long and steady application of the best 
powers of such men as it can command to master even 
its first principles. It is curious, that, in a country 
.which boasts of its intelligence, the theory should be so 
generally held that the most complicated of human con- 
trivances, and one which every day becomes more com- 
plicated, can be worked at sight by any man able to 
talk' for an hour or two without stopping to think. 

Mr. Lincoln is sometimes claimed as an example of a 
ready-made ruler. But no case could well be less in 
point ; for, besides that he was a man of such fair-mind- 
edness as is always the raw material of wisdom, he had 



164 -ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

in his profession a training precisely the opposite of that 
to which a partisan is subjected. His experience as a 
lawyer compelled him not only to see that there is a 
principle underlying every phenomenon in human affairs, 
but that there are always two sides to every question, 
both of which must be fully understood in order to un- 
derstand either, and that it is of greater advantage to 
an advocate to appreciate the strength than the weakness 
of his antagonist's position. Nothing is more remarka- 
ble than the unerring tact with which, in his debate with 
Mr. Douglas, he went straight to the reason of the ques- 
tion ; nor have we ever had a more striking lesson in 
political tactics than the fact, that, opposed to a man 
exceptionally adroit in using popular prejudice and big- 
otry to his purpose, exceptionally unscrupulous in ap- 
pealing to those baser motives that turn a meeting of 
citizens into a mob of barbarians, he should yet have won 
his case before a jury of the people. Mr. Lincoln was 
as far as possible from an impromptu politician. His 
wisdom was made up of a knowledge of things as well as 
of men ; his sagacity resulted from a clear perception 
and honest acknowledgment of difficulties, which enabled 
him to see that the only durable triumph of political 
opinion is based, not on any abstract right, but upon so 
much of justice, the highest attainable at any given 
moment in human affairs, as may be had in the balance 
of mutual concession. Doubtless he had an ideal, but it 
was the ideal of a practical statesman, — to aim at the 
best, and to take the next best, if he is lucky enough 
to get even that. His slow, but singularly masculine, 
intelligence taught him that precedent is only another 
name for embodied experience, and that it counts for 
even more in the guidance of communities of men than 
in that of the individual life. He was not a man who 
held it good public economy to pull down on the mere 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 165 

chance of rebuilding better. Mr. Lincoln's faith in God 
was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the 
wisdom of man. Perhaps it was his want of self-confi- 
dence that more than anything else won him the unlim- 
ited confidence of the people, for they felt that there 
would be no need of retreat from any position he had 
deliberately taken. The cautious, but steady, advance 
of his policy during the war was like that of a Roman 
army. He left behind him a firm road on which public 
confidence could follow ; he took America with him 
where he went ; what he gained he occupied, and his 
advanced posts became colonies. The very homeliness 
of his genius was its distinction. His kingship was con- 
spicuous by its workday homespun. Never was ruler so 
absolute as he, nor so little conscious of it ; for he was 
the incarnate common-sense of the people. With all 
that tenderness of nature whose sweet sadness touched 
whoever saw him with something of its own pathos, there 
was no trace of sentimentalism in his speech or action. 
He seems to have had but one rule of conduct, always 
that of practical and successful politics, to let himself 
be guided by events, when they were sure to bring him 
out where he wished to go, though by what seemed to 
unpractical minds, which let go the possible to grasp at 
the desirable, a longer road. 

Undoubtedly the highest function of statesmanship is 
by degrees to accommodate the conduct of communities to 
ethical laws, and to subordinate the conflicting self-inter- 
ests of the day to higher and more permanent concerns. 
But it is on the understanding, and not on the senti- 
ment, of a nation that all safe legislation must be based. 
Voltaire's saying, that " a consideration of petty circum- 
stances is the tomb of great things," may be true of 
individual men, but it certainly is not true of govern- 
ments. It is by a multitude of such considerations, each 



166 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

in itself trifling, bnt all together weighty, that the framers 
of policy can alone divine what is practicable and there- 
fore wise. The imputation of inconsistency is one to 
which every sound politician and every honest thinker 
must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and 
the dead alone never change their opinion. The course 
of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, 
avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of con- 
cession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men 
soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking 
the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, 
yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited 
from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting 
open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce 
through what seem the eternal barriers of both. It 
is loyalty to great ends, even though forced to combine 
the small and opposing motives of selfish men to accom- 
plish them ; it is the anchored cling to solid principles of 
duty and action, which knows how to swing with the 
tide, but is never carried away by it, — that we demand 
in public men, and not sameness of policy, or a conscien- 
tious persistency in what is impracticable. For the im- 
practicable, however theoretically enticing, is always po- 
litically unwise, sound statesmanship being the applica- 
tion of that prudence to the public business which is the 
safest guide in that of private men. 

No doubt slavery was the most delicate and embarrass- 
ing question with which Mr. Lincoln was called on to deal, 
and it was one which no man in his position, whatever his 
opinions, could evade ; for, though he might withstand 
the clamor of partisans, he must sooner or later yield to 
the persistent importunacy of circumstances, which thrust 
the problem upon him at every turn and in every shape. 

It has been brought against us as an accusation 
abroad, and repeated here by peojjle who measure their 



ABB AH AM LINCOLN. 167 

country rather by what is thought of it than by what 
it is, that our war has not been distinctly and avow- 
edly for the extinction of slavery, but a war rather for 
the preservation of our national power and greatness, in 
which the emancipation of the negro has been forced 
upon us by circumstances and accepted as a necessity. 
We are very far from denying this ; nay, we admit that 
it is so far true that we were slow to renounce our con- 
stitutional obligations even toward those who had ab- 
solved us by their ow T n act from the letter of our duty. 
We are speaking of the government w 7 hich, legally in- 
stalled for the whole country, was bound, so long as 
it was possible, not to overstep the limits of orderly pre- 
scription, and could not, without abnegating its ow T n 
very nature, take the lead in making rebellion an ex- 
cuse for revolution. There were, no doubt, many ardent 
and sincere persons who seemed to think this as simple 
a thing to do as to lead off a Virginia reel. They forgot 
what should be forgotten least of all in a system like 
ours, that the administration for the time being repre- 
sents not only the majority which elects it, but the 
minority as well, — a minority in this case powerful, 
and so little ready for emancipation that it was opposed 
even to war. Mr. Lincoln had not been chosen as 
general agent of an antislavery society, but President of 
the United States, to perform certain . functions exactly 
defined by law. Whatever were his wishes, it was no 
less duty than policy to mark out for himself a line of 
action that would not further distract .the country, by 
raising before their time questions which plainly would 
soon enough compel attention, and for w r hich every day 
was making the answer more easy. 

Meanwhile he must solve the riddle of this new 
Sphinx, or be devoured. Though Mr. Lincoln's policy 
in this critical affair has not been such as to satisfy 



168 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

those who demand an heroic treatment for even the 
most trifling occasion, and who will not cut their coat 
according to their cloth, unless they can borrow the 
scissors of Atropos, it has been at least not unworthy of 
the long-headed king of Ithaca. Mr. Lincoln had the 
choice of Bassanio offered him. Which of the three 
caskets held the prize that was to redeem the fortunes 
of the country 1 There was the golden one whose showy 
speciousuess might have tempted a vain man ; the silver 
of compromise, which might have decided the choice of 
a merely acute one ; and the leaden, — dull and homely- 
looking, as prudence always is, — yet with something 
about it sure to attract the eye of practical wisdom. 
Mr. Lincoln dallied with his decision perhaps longer than 
seemed needful to those on whom its awful responsibility 
was not to rest, but when he made it, it was worthy of 
his cautious but sure-footed understanding. The moral 
of the Sphinx-riddle, and it is a deep one, lies in the 
childish simplicity of the solution. Those who fail in 
guessing it, fail because they are over-ingenious, and 
cast about for an answer that shall suit their own notion 
of the gravity of the occasion and of their own dignity, 
rather than the occasion itself. 

In a matter which must be finally settled by public 
opinion, and in regard to which the ferment of prejudice 
and passion on both sides has not yet subsided to that 
equilibrium of compromise from which alone a sound 
public opinion can result, it is proper enough for the 
private citizen to press his own convictions with all pos- 
sible force of argument and persuasion ; but the popular 
magistrate, whose judgment must become action, and 
whose action involves the whole country, is bound to 
wait till the sentiment of the people is so far advanced 
toward his own point of view, that what he does shall 
find support in it, instead of merely confusing it with 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 169 

new elements of division. It was not unnatural that 
men earnestly devoted to the saving of their country, 
and profoundly convinced that slavery was its only real 
enemy, should demand a decided policy round which all 
patriots might rally, — and this might have been the 
wisest course for an absolute ruler. But in the then 
unsettled state of the public mind, with a large party 
decrying even resistance to the slaveholders' rebellion as 
not only unwise, but even unlawful; with a majority, 
perhaps, even of the would-be loyal so long accustomed 
to regard the Constitution as a deed of gift conveying to 
the South their own judgment as to policy and instinct 
as to right, that they were in doubt at first whether 
their loyalty were due to the country or to slavery ; and 
with a respectable body of honest and influential men 
who still believed in the possibility of conciliation, — Mr. 
Lincoln judged wisely, that, in laying down a policy in 
deference to one party, he should be giving to the other 
the very fulcrum for which their disloyalty had been 
waiting. 

It behooved a clear-headed man in his position not to 
yield so far to an honest indignation against the brokers 
of treason in the North as to lose sight of the materials 
for misleading which were their stock in trade, and 
to forget that it is not the falsehood of sophistry which 
is to be feared, but the grain of truth mingled with 
it to make it specious, — that it is not the knavery of 
the leaders so much as the honesty of the followers they 
may seduce, that gives them power for evil. It was 
especially his duty to do nothing which might help the 
people to forget the true cause of the war in fruitless 
disputes about its inevitable consequences. 

The doctrine of State rights can be so handled by an 
adroit demagogue as easily to confound the distinction 
between liberty and lawlessness in the minds of ignorant 



170 ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

persons, accustomed always to be influenced by the 
sound of certain words, rather than to reflect upon the 
principles which give them meaning. For, though Seces- 
sion involves the manifest absurdity of denying to a 
State the right of making war against any foreign power 
while permitting it against the United States; though 
it supposes a compact of mutual concessions and guaran- 
ties among States without any arbiter in case of dissen- 
sion ; though it contradicts common-sense in assuming 
that the men who framed our government did not know 
what they meant w T hen they substituted Union for Con- 
federation ; though it falsifies history, which shows that 
the main opposition to the adoption of the Constitution 
was based on the argument that it did not allow that 
independence in the several States which alone would 
justify them in seceding; — }^et, as slavery was univer- 
sally admitted to be a reserved right, an inference could 
be drawn from any direct attack upon it (though only in 
self-defence) to a natural right of resistance, logical 
enough to satisfy minds untrained to detect fallacy, as 
the majority of men always are, and now too much dis- 
turbed by the disorder of the times, to consider that the 
order of events had any legitimate bearing on the argu- 
ment. Though Mr. Lincoln was too sagacious to give 
the Northern allies of the Rebels the occasion they 
desired and even strove to provoke, yet from the begin- 
ning of the war the most persistent efforts have been 
made to confuse the public mind as to its origin and 
motives, and to drag the people of the loyal States down 
from the national position they had instinctively taken 
to the old level of party squabbles and antipathies. The 
wholly unprovoked rebellion of an oligarchy proclaim- 
ing negro slavery the corner-stone of free institutions, 
and in the first flush of over-hasty confidence venturing 
to parade the logical sequence of their leading dogma, 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 171 

" that slavery is right in principle, and has nothing to 
do with difference of complexion," has been represented 
as a legitimate and gallant attempt to maintain the true 
principles of democracy. The rightful endeavor of an 
established government, the least onerous that ever 
existed, to defend itself against a treacherous attack on 
its very existence, has been cunningly made to seem the 
wicked effort of a fanatical clique to force its doctrines 
on an oppressed population. 

Even so long ago as when Mr. Lincoln, not yet con- 
vinced of the danger and magnitude of the crisis, was 
endeavoring to persuade himself of Union majorities at 
the South, and to carry on a war that was half peace in 
the hope of a peace that would have been all war, — 
while he was still enforcing the Fugitive Slave Law, 
under some theory that Secession, however it might 
absolve States from their obligations, could not escheat 
them of their claims under the Constitution, and that 
slaveholders in rebellion had alone among mortals the 
privilege of having their cake and eating it at the same 
time, — the enemies of free government were striving 
to persuade the people that the war was an Abolition 
crusade- To rebel without reason was proclaimed as 
one of the rights of man, while it was carefully kept 
out of sight that to suppress rebellion is the first duty 
of government. All the evils that have come upon the 
country have been attributed to the Abolitionists, though 
it is hard to see how any party can become permanently 
powerful except in one of two ways, — either by the 
greater truth of its principles, or the extravagance of 
the party opposed to it. To fancy the ship of state, 
riding safe at her constitutional moorings, suddenly 
engulfed by a huge kraken of Abolitionism, rising from 
unknown depths and grasping it with slimy tentacles, is 
to look at the natural history of the matter with the 



172 • ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

eyes of Pontoppidan. To believe that the leaders in 
the Southern treason feared any danger from Abolition- 
ism, would be to deny them ordinary intelligence, though 
there can be little doubt that they made use of it to 
stir the passions and excite the fears of their deluded 
accomplices. They rebelled, not because they thought 
slavery weak, but because they believed it strong 
enough, not to overthrow the government, but to get 
possession of it ; for it becomes daily clearer that they 
used rebellion only as a means of revolution, and if they 
got revolution, though not in the shape they looked for, 
is the American people to save them from its conse- 
quences at the cost of its own existence 1 The election 
of Mr. Lincoln, which it was clearly in their power to 
prevent had they wished, was the occasion merely, and 
not the cause, of their revolt. Abolitionism, till within 
a year or two, was the despised heresy of a few earnest 
persons, without political weight enough to carry the 
election of a parish constable ; and their cardinal prin- 
ciple was disunion, because they were convinced that 
within the Union the position of slavery was impregna- 
ble. In spite of the proverb, great effects do not 
follow from small causes, — that is, disproportionately 
small, — but from adequate causes acting under certain 
required conditions. To contrast the size of the oak 
with that of the parent acorn, as if the poor seed had 
paid all costs from its slender strong-box, may serve for 
a child's wonder ; but the real miracle lies in that divine 
league which bound all the forces of nature to the ser- 
vice of the tiny germ in fulfilling its destiny. Every- 
thing has been at work for the past ten years in the 
cause of antislavery, but Garrison and Phillips have been 
far less successful propagandists than the slaveholders 
themselves, with the constantly -growing arrogance of 
their pretensions and encroachments. They have forced 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 173 

the question upon the attention of every voter in the 
Free States, by defiantly putting freedom and democracy 
on the defensive. But, even after the Kansas outrages, 
there was no wide-spread desire on the part of the North 
to commit aggressions, though there was a growing 
determination to resist them. The popular unanimity 
in favor of the war three years ago was but in small 
measure the result of antislavery sentiment, far less of 
any zeal for abolition. But every month of the war, 
every movement of the allies of slavery in the Free 
States, has been making Abolitionists by the thousand. 
The masses of any people, however intelligent, are very 
little moved by abstract principles of humanity and 
justice, until those principles are interpreted for them 
by the stinging commentary of some infringement upon 
their own rights, and then their instincts and passions, 
once aroused, do indeed derive an incalculable reinforce- 
ment of impulse and intensity from those higher ideas, 
those sublime traditions, which have no motive political 
force till they are allied with a sense of immediate per- 
sonal wrong or imminent peril. Then at last the stars 
in their courses begin to fight against Sisera. Had any 
one doubted before that the rights of human nature are 
unitary, that oppression is of one hue the world over, 
no matter what the color of the oppressed, — had any 
one failed to see what the real essence of the contest 
was, — the efforts of the advocates of slavery among 
ourselves to throw discredit upon the fundamental 
axioms of the Declaration of Independence and the 
radical doctrines of Christianity, could not fail to sharp- 
en his eyes. 

While every day was bringing the people nearer to the 
conclusion which all thinking men saw to be inevitable 
from the beginning, it was wise in Mr. Lincoln to leave 
the shaping of his policy to events. In this country, 



174 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

where the rough and ready understanding of the people 
is sure at last to be the controlling power, a profound 
common-sense is the best genius for statesmanship. 
Hitherto the wisdom of the President's measures has 
been justified by the fact that they have always resulted 
in more firmly uniting public opinion. One of the 
things particularly admirable in the public utterances 
of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, 
which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment 
of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal 
character. There must be something essentially noble 
in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of con- 
fidential ease without losing respect, something very 
manly in one who can break through the etiquette of 
his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason 
and intelligence of those who have elected him. No 
higher compliment was ever paid to a nation than the 
simple confidence, the fireside plainness, with which Mr. 
Lincoln always addresses himself to the reason of the 
American people. This was, indeed, a true democrat, 
who grounded himself on the assumption that a democ- 
racy can think. "Come, let us reason together about 
this matter," has been the tone of all his addresses to 
the people; and accordingly we have never had a chief 
magistrate who so won to himself the love and at the 
same time the judgment of his countrymen. .To us, 
that simple confidence of his in the right-mindedness of 
his fellow-men is very touching, and its success is as 
strong an argument as we have ever seen in favor of the 
theory that men can govern themselves. He never 
appeals to any vulgar sentiment, he never alludes to the 
humbleness of his origin ; it probably never occurred to 
him, indeed, that there was anything higher to start 
from than manhood ; and he put himself on a level with 
those he addressed, not by going down to them, but 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 175 

only by taking it for granted that they had brains and 
would come up to a common ground of reason. In an 
article lately printed in "The Nation," Mr. Bayard 
Taylor mentions the striking fact, that in the foulest 
dens of the Five Points he found the portrait of Lincoln. 
The wretched population that makes its hive there 
threw all its votes and more against him, and j r et paid 
this instinctive tribute to the sweet humanity of his 
nature. Their ignorance sold its vote and took its 
money, but all that was left of manhood in them recog- 
nized its saint and martyr. 

Mr. Lincoln is not in the habit of saying, "This is 
my opinion, or my theory," but, " This is the conclusion 
to which, in my judgment, the time has come, and to' 
which, accordingly, the sooner we come the better for 
us." His policy has been the policy of public opinion 
based on adequate discussion and on a timely recogni- 
tion of the influence of passing events in shaping the 
features of events to come. 

One secret of Mr. Lincoln's remarkable success in 
captivating the popular mind is undoubtedly an un- 
consciousness of self which enables him, though under 
the necessity of constantly using the capital /, to do it 
without any suggestion of egotism. There is no single 
vowel which men's mouths can pronounce with such 
difference of effect. That which one shall hide away, 
as it were, behind the substance of his discourse, or, if 
he bring it to the front, shall use merely to give an 
agreeable accent of individuality to what he says, another 
shall make an offensive challenge to the self-satisfaction 
of all his hearers, and an unwarranted intrusion upon 
each man's sense of personal importance, irritating every 
pore of his vanity, like a dry northeast wind, to a goose- 
flesh of opposition and hostility. Mr. Lincoln has never 
studied Quinctilian; but he has, in the earnest sim- 



176 ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 

plicity and unaffected Americanism of his own character, 
one art of oratory worth all the rest. He forgets him- 
self so entirely in his object as to give his / the sympa- 
thetic and persuasive effect of We with the great body 
of his countrymen. Homely, dispassionate, showing all 
the rough-edged process of his thought as it goes along, 
yet arriving at his conclusions with an honest kind of 
every-day logic, he is so eminently our representative 
man, that, when he speaks, it seems as if the people 
were listening to their own thinking aloud. The dig- 
nity of his thought owes nothing to any ceremonial 
garb of words, but to the manly movement that comes 
of settled purpose and an energy of reason that knows 
not what rhetoric means. There has been nothing of 
Cleon, still less of Strepsiades striving to underbid him 
in demagogism, to be found in the public utterances of 
Mr. Lincoln. He has always addressed the intelligence 
of men, never their prejudice, their passion, or their 
ignorance. 



On the day of his death, this simple Western attor- 
ney, who according to one party was a vulgar joker, 
and whom the doctrinaires among his own supporters 
accused of wanting every element of statesmanship, 
was the most absolute ruler in Christendom, and this 
solely by the hold his good-humored sagacity had 
laid on the hearts and understandings of his country- 
men. Nor was this all, for it appeared that he had 
drawn the great majority, not only of his fellow-citizens, 
but of mankind also, to his side. So strong and so 
persuasive is honest manliness without a single quality 
of romance or unreal sentiment to help it ! A civilian 
during times of the most captivating military achieve- 
ment, awkward, with no skill in the lower technicalities 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN. 177 

of manners, he left behind him a fame beyond that of 
any conqueror, the memory of a grace higher than that 
of outward person, and of a gentlemanliness deeper than 
mere breeding. Never before that startled April morn- 
ing did such multitudes of men shed tears for the death 
of one they had never seen, as if with him a friendly 
presence had been taken 'away from their lives, leaving 
them colder and darker. Never was funeral panegyric 
so eloquent as the silent look of sympathy which stran- 
gers exchanged when they met on that day. Their 
common manhood had lost a kinsman. 



THE LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES 
GATES PERC1VAL. 



THIS is an interesting and in many respects instruc- 
tive book. Mr. Ward has done his work, as is 
fitting, in a loving spirit ; and if he over-estimates both 
what Percival was and what he did, he enables us to 
form our own judgment by letting him so far as possible 
speak for himself. The book gives a rather curious 
picture of what the life of a man of letters is likely to 
be in a country not yet ripe for literary production, 
especially if he be not endowed with the higher qualities 
which command and can wait for that best of all suc- 
cesses which comes slowly. In a generation where 
everybody can write verses, and where certain modes of 
thought and turns of phrase have become so tyrannous 
that it is as hard to distinguish between the produc- 
tions of one minor poet and another as among those of 
so many Minnesingers or Troubadours, there is a de- 
mand for only two things, — for what chimes with the 
moment's whim of popular sentiment and is forgotten 
when that has changed, or for what is never an anachro- 
nism, because it slakes or seems to slake the eternal thirst 
of our nature for those ideal waters that glimmer before 
us and still before us in ever-renewing mirage. Percival 
met neither of these conditions. With a nature singu- 
larly unplastic, unsympathetic, and self-involved, he was 
incapable of receiving into his own mind the ordinary 
emotions of men and giving them back in music ; and 



LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 179 

with a lofty conception of the object and purposes of 
poesy, he had neither the resolution nor the power 
which might have enabled him to realize it. He offers 
as striking an example as could be found of the poetic 
temperament unballasted with those less obvious quali- 
ties which make the poetic faculty. His verse carries 
every inch of canvas that diction and sentiment can 
crowd, but the craft is cranky, and we miss that deep- 
grasping keel of reason which alone can steady and give 
direction. His mind drifts, too waterlogged to answer 
the helm, and in his longer poems, like " Prometheus," 
half the voyage is spent in trying to make up for a lee- 
way which becomes at last irretrievable. If he had a 
port in view when he set out, he seems soon to give up 
all hope of ever reaching it ; and wherever we open the 
log-book, we find him running for nowhere in particular, 
as the wind happens to lead, or lying-to in the merest 
gale of verbiage. The truth is, that Percival was led to 
the writing of verse by a sentimental desire of the mind, 
and not by that concurring instinct of all the faculties 
which is a self-forgetting passion of the entire man. 
Too excitable to possess his subject fully, as a man of 
mere talent may often do, he is not possessed by it as 
the man of genius is, and seems helplessly striving, the 
greater part of the time, to make out what, in the name 
of common or uncommon sense, he is after. With all 
the stock properties of verse whirling and dancing about 
his ears puffed out to an empty show of life, the reader 
of much of his blank verse feels as if a mob of well- 
draperied clothes-lines were rioting about him in all the 
unwilling ecstasy of a thunder-gust. 

Percival, living from 1795 to 1856, arrived at man- 
hood just as the last war with England had come to an 
end. Poor, shy, and proud, there is nothing in his 
earlier years that might not be paralleled in those of 



180 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 

hundreds of sensitive boys who gradually get the non- 
sense shaken out of them in the rough school of life. 
The length of the schooling needful in his case is what 
makes it peculiar. Not till after he was fifty, if even 
then, did he learn that the world never takes a man at 
his own valuation, and never pays money for what it 
does not want, or think it wants. It did not want his 
poetry, simply because it was not, is not, and by no con- 
ceivable power of argument can be made, interesting, — 
the first duty of eveiy artistic product. Percival, who 
would have thought his neighbors mad if they had in- 
sisted on his buying twenty thousand refrigerators mere- 
ly because they had been at the trouble of making them, 
and found it convenient to turn them into cash, could 
never forgive the world for taking this business view of 
the matter in his own case. He went on doggedly, 
making refrigerators of every possible pattern, and com- 
forted himself with the thought of a wiser posterity, 
which should have learned that the purpose of poetry is 
to cool and not to kindle. His " Mind," which is on 
the whole perhaps the best of his writings, vies in cold- 
ness with the writings of his brother doctor, Akenside, 
whose " Pleasures of Imagination" are something quite 
other than pleasing in reality. If there be here and 
there a semblance of pale fire, it is but the reflection of 
moonshine upon ice. Akenside is respectable, because 
he really had something new to say, in spite of his pom- 
pous, mouthing way of saying it ; but when Percival 
says it over again, it is a little too much. In his more 
ambitious pieces, — and it is curious how literally the 
word " pieces " applies to all he did, — he devotes him- 
self mainly to telling us what poetry ought to be, as if 
mankind were not always more than satisfied with any 
one who fulfils the true office of poet, by showing them, 
with the least possible fuss, what it is. Percival was a 



LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PEKCIVAL. 181 

professor of poetry rather than a poet, and we are not 
surprised at the number of lectures he reads us, when 
we learn that in early life he was an excellent demon- 
strator of anatomy, whose subject must be dead before 
his business with it begins. His interest in poetry was 
always more or less scientific. He was forever trying 
experiments in matter and form, especially the latter. 
And these were especially unhappy, because it is plain 
that he had no musical ear, or at best a very imperfect 
one. His attempts at classical metres are simply un- 
readable, whether as verse or prose. He contrives to 
make even the Sapphic so, which when we read it in 
Latin moves featly to our modern accentuation. Let 
any one who wishes to feel the difference between ear 
and no ear compare Percival's specimens with those in 
the same kind of Coleridge, who had the finest metrical 
sense since Milton. We take this very experimenting 
to be a sufficient proof that Percival's faculty, such as it 
was, and we do not rate it highly, was artificial, and not 
innate. The true poet is much rather experimented 
upon by life and nature, by joy and sorrow, by beauty 
and defect, till it be found out whether he have any 
hidden music in him that can sing them into an accord 
with the eternal harmony which we call God. 

It is easy to trace the literary influences to wdiich the 
mind of Percival was in turn subjected. Early in life 
we find a taint of Byronism, w T hich indeed does not 
wholly disappear to the last. There is among his poems 
" An Imprecation," of which a single stanza w T ill suffice 
as a specimen : — 

" Wrapped in sheets of gory lightning, 
While cursed night-hags ring thy knell, 
May the arm of vengeance bright'ning, 
O'er thee wave the sword of hell ! " 

If we could fancy Laura Matilda shut up tipsy in the 



182 LIFE AND LETTEES OF JAMFS GATES PERCIVAL. 

watch-house, we might suppose her capable of this me- 
lodious substitute for swearing. We confess that we 
cannot read it without laughing, after learning from Mr. 
Ward that its Salmoneus-thunderbolts were launched at 
the comfortable little city of Hartford, because the poet 
fancied that the inhabitants thereof did not like him or 
his verses so much as he himself did. There is some- 
thing deliciously ludicrous in the conception of night- 
hags ringing the orthodox bell of the Second Congrega- 
tional or First Baptist Meeting-house to summon the 
parishioners to witness these fatal consequences of not 
reading Percival's poems. Nothing less than the fear 
of some such catastrophe could compel the perusal of 
the greater part of them. Next to Byron comes Moore, 
whose cloying sentimentalism and too facile melody are 
recalled by the subject and treatment of very many of 
the shorter lyrics of Percival. In " Prometheus " it is 
Shelley who is paramount for the time, and Shelley at 
his worst period, before his unwieldy abundance of 
incoherent words and images, that were merely words 
and images without any meaning of real experience to 
give them solidity, had been compressed in the stricter 
moulds of thought and study. In the blank verse 
again, we encounter Wordsworth's tone and sentiment. 
These were no good models for Percival, who always 
improvised, and who seems to have thought verse the 
great distinction between poetry and prose. Percival 
got nothing from Shelley but the fatal copiousness which 
is his vice, nothing from Wordsworth but that tendency 
to preach at every corner about a sympathy with nature 
which is not his real distinction, and which becomes a 
wearisome cant at second-hand. Shelley and Words- 
worth are both stilted, though in different ways. Shel- 
ley wreathed his stilts with flowers; while Wordsworth, 
protesting against the use of them as sinful, mounts his 



LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 183 

solemnly at last, and stalks away conscientiously eschew- 
ing; whatever would serve to hide the naked wood, — 
nay, was it not Gray's only that were scandalous, and 
were not his own, modelled upon those of the sainted 
Cowper, of strictly orthodox pattern after all % Percival, 
like all imitators, is caught by the defects of what he 
copies, and exaggerates them. With him the stilts are 
the chief matter ; and getting a taller pair than either 
of his predecessors, he lifts his commonplace upon them 
only to make it more drearily conspicuous. Shelley has 
his gleams of unearthly wildfire, Wordsworth is by fits 
the most deeply inspired man of his generation ; but 
Percival has no lucid interval. He is pertinaciously and 
unappeasably dull, — as dull as a comedy of Goethe. 
He never in his life wrote a rememberable verse. We 
should not have thought this of any consequence now, 
for we need not try to read him, did not Mr. Ward with 
amusing gravity all along assume that he was a great 
poet. There was scarce timber enough in him for the 
making of a Tiedge or a Hagedorn, both of whom he 
somewhat resembles. 

Percival came to maturity at an unfortunate time for 
a man so liable to self-delusion. Leaving college with so 
imperfect a classical training (in spite of the numerous 
" testimonials " cited by Mr. Ward) that he was capable 
of laying the accent on the second syllable of Pericles, 
he seems never to have S} T stematically trained even such 
faculty as was in him, but to have gone on to the end 
mistaking excitability of brain for wholesome exercise of 
thought. The consequence is a prolonged immaturity, 
which makes his latest volume, published in 1843, as 
crude and as plainly wanting in enduring- quality as the 
first number of his " Clio." We have the same old com- 
plaints of neglected genius, — as if geiim* could ever be 
neglected so long as it has the perennial .• isolation of 



184 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 

its own divine society, — the same wilted sentiment, the 
same feeling about for topics of verse in which he may 
possibly find that inspiration from without which the 
true poet cannot flee from in himself. These tedious 
wailings about heavenly powers suffocating in the heavy 
atmosphere of an uncongenial, unrecognizing world, and 
Percival is profuse of them, are simply an advertisement 
to whoever has ears of some innate disability in the man 
who utters them. Heavenly powers know very well how 
to take care of themselves. The poor " World," meaning 
thereby that small fraction of society which has any 
personal knowledge of an author or his affairs, has had 
great wrong done it in such matters. It is not, and 
never was, the powers of a man that it neglects, — it 
could not if it w r ould, — but his weaknesses, and espe- 
cially the publication of them, of which it grows weaiy. 
It can never supply any man with what is wanting 
in himself, and the attempt to do it only makes bad 
worse. If a man can find the proof of his own genius 
only in public appreciation, still worse, if his vanity con- 
sole itself with taking it as an evidence of rare qualities 
in himself that his fellow-mortals are unable to see them, 
it is all up with him. The " World " resolutely refused 
to find Wordsworth entertaining, and it refuses still, on 
good grounds ; but the genius that was in him bore up 
unflinchingly, would take no denial, got its claim admit- 
ted on all hands, and impregnated at last the literature 
of an entire generation, though habitans in sicco, if ever 
genius did. But Percival seems to have satisfied him- 
self with a syllogism something like this : Men of genius 
are neglected ; the more neglect, the more genius ; I am 
altogether neglected, — ergo, wholly made up of that 
priceless material. 

The truth was that he suffered rather from over- 
appreciation ; and "when," says a nameless old French' 



LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 185 

man, " I see a man go up like a rocket, I expect before 

long to see the stick come down." The times were 

singularly propitious to mediocrity. As in Holland one 

had only to 

u Invent a shovel and be a magistrate," 

so here to write a hundred blank verses was to be im- 
mortal, till somebody else wrote a hundred and fifty 
blanker ones. It had been resolved unanimously that 
we must and would have a national literature. England, 
France, Spain, Italy, each already had one, Germany 
was getting one made as fast as possible, and Ireland 
vowed that she once had one far surpassing them all. 
To be respectable, we must ha\ on also, and that 
speedily. That we were not yet, in any true sense, a 
nation ; that we wanted that literary and social atmos- 
phere which is the breath of life bo ail artistic produc- 
tion; that our scholarship, such an it was, was mostly 
of that theological sort which acts like a prolonged 
drouth upon the brain ; that our poetic fathers were 
Joel Barlow and Timothy Dwight, — was nothing to the 
purpose ; a literature adapted to the size of the coun- 
try was what we must and would havs. Given the 
number of square miles, the length of the rivers, the 
size of the lakes, and you have the greatness of the lit- 
erature we were bound to produce without further 
delay. If that little dribble of an Avon had succeeded 
in engendering Shakespeare, what a giant might we not 
look for from the mighty womb of Mississippi ! Physical 
Geography for the first time took her rightful place 
as the tenth and most inspiring Muse. A glance at the 
map would satisfy the most incredulous that she had 
done her best for us, and should we be wanting to the 
glorious opportunity 1 Not we indeed ! So surely as 
Franklin invented the art of printing, Etnd Fulton the 
steam-engine, we would invent us a i poet in time 



186 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 

to send the news by the next packet to England, and 
teach her that we were her masters in arts as well as 
arms. 

Percival was only too ready to be invented, and he 
forthwith produced his bale of verses from a loom capa- 
ble of turning off a hitherto unheard-of number of yards 
to the hour, and perfectly adapted to the amplitude of 
our territory, inasmuch as it was manufactured on the 
theory of covering the largest surface with the least 
possible amount of meaning that would hold words 
together. He was as ready to accept the perilous em- 
prise, and as loud in asserting his claim thereto, as 
Sir Kay used to be, and with much the same result. 
Our critical journals — and America certainly has led 
the world in a department of letters which of course 
requires no outfit but the power to read and write, gra- 
tuitously furnished by our public schools — received him 
with a shout of welcome. Here came the true deliverer 
at last, mounted on a steed to which he himself had 
given the new name of "Pegasus," — for we were to be 
original in c ] king, — and certainly blowing his own 
trumpet with remarkable vigor of lungs. Solitary en- 
thusiasts, who had long awaited this sublime avatar, 
addressed him in sonnets which he accepted with a 
gravity beyond all praise. (To be sure, even Mr. Ward 
seems to allow that his sense of humor was hardly equal 
to his other transcendent endowments.) His path was 
strewn with laurel — of the native variety, altogether 
superior to that of the Old World, at any rate not pre- 
cisely like it. Yerses signed " P.," as like each other as 
tw r o peas, and as. much like poetry as that vegetable 
is like a peach, were watched for in the corner of a news- 
paper as an astronomer watches for a new planet. There 
was never an;: I ing so comically unreal since the crown- 
ing in the Oapitol of Messer Francesco Petrarca, Grand 



LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 187 

Sentimentalist in Ordinary at the Court of King Robert 
of Naples. Unhappily, Percival took it all quite seri- 
ously. There was no praise too ample for the easy 
elasticity of his swallow. He believed himself as gigan- 
tic as the shadow he cast on these rolling mists of insub- 
stantial adulation, and life-long he could never make out 
why his fine words refused to butter his parsnips for 
him, nay, to furnish both parsnips and sauce. • While the 
critics were debating precisely how many of the prime 
qualities of the great poets of his own and preceding 
generations he combined in his single genius, and in 
what particular respects he surpassed them all, — a 
point about which he himself seems never to have had 
any doubts, — the public, which could read Scott and 
Byron with avidity, and w T hich was beginning even to 
taste Wordsworth, found his verses me-vpressibly weari- 
some. They would not throng and subscribe for a col- 
lected edition of those works which singly had been too 
much for them. With whatever dulni ss of sense they 
may be charged, they have a remarkably keen scent for 
tediousness, and will have none of it unless in a tract or 
sermon, where, of course, it is to be expt- ted. Percival 
never forgave the public ; but it was the critics that he 
never should have forgiven, for of all ti. maggots that 
can make their way into the brains through the ears, 
there is none so disastrous as the persuasion that you 
are a great poet. There is surely something in the con- 
struction of the ears of small authors which lays them 
specially open to the inroads of this pest. It tickles 
pleasantly while it eats away the fibre of will, and inca- 
pacitates a man for all honest cowme'vt with realities. 
Unhappily its insidious titillation seems to have been 
Percival's one great pleasure during life. 

We began by saying that the book before us was 
interesting and instructive ; but we meant that it was so 



188 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 

not so much from any positive merits of its own as by 
the lesson which almost every page of it suggests. To 
those who have some knowledge of the history of litera- 
ture, or some experience in life, it is from beginning 
to end a history of weakness mistaking great desires for 
great powers. If poetry, in Bacon's noble definition of 
it, "adapt the shows of things to the desires of the mind," 
sentimentalism is equally skilful in making realities 
shape themselves to the cravings of vanity. The theory 
that the poet is a being above the world and apart from 
it is true of him as an observer only who applies to the 
phenomena about him the test of a finer and more spirit- 
ual sense. That he is a creature divinely set apart from 
his fellow-men by a mental organization that makes 
them mutually unintelligible to each other, is in flat 
contradiction with the lives of those poets universally 
acknowledged as greatest. Dante, Shakespeare, Cer- 
vantes, Calderon, Milton, Moliere, Goethe, — in what 
conceivable s e is it true of them that they wanted 
the manly q ties which made them equal to the 
demands of the world in which they lived 1 That a poet 
should assmn s Victor Hugo used to do, that he is a 
reorganizer of .- moral world, and that works cunningly 
adapted to th< opular whim of the time form part of 
some mysterio - system which is to give us a new heaven 
and a new earth, and to remodel laws of art which are 
as unchangeable is those of astronomy, can do no very 
great harm to a ly one but the author himself, who will 
thereby be led ;i stray from his proper function, and from 
the only path legitimate and lasting success. But 
when the theorv is carried a step further, and we are 
asked to believ< as in Percival's case, that, because 
a man can write • rses, he is exempt from that inexora- 
ble logic of life an I. circumstance to which all other men 
are subjected, and to which it is wholesome for them 






LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 189 

that they should be, then it becomes mischievous, and 
calls for a protest from all those who have at heart the 
interests of good morals and healthy literature. It is 
the theory of idlers and dilettanti, of fribbles in morals 
and declaimers in verse, which a young man of real 
power may dally with during some fit of mental indiges- 
tion, but which when accepted by a mature man, and 
carried along with him through life, is a sure mark 
of feebleness and of insincere dealing with himself. Per- 
cival is a good example of a class of unhappily 

too numerous in these latter days hi Europe the 
natural growth of a world ill at ease with itself and still 
nervous with the frightful palpitation of the French 
Revolution, they are but feeble exotics m m healthier 
air. Without faith or hope, and deprived of that out- 
ward support in the habitual procession of events and in 
the authoritative limitations of thor oh in ordi- 

nary times gives steadiness to feeble and timid intellects, 
they are turned inward, and forced, like Hudibras's 
sword, 

" To eat into themselves, for lack 
Of other thing to hew and hack." 

Compelled to find within them that e which had hith- 
erto been supplied by creeds and institutions, they learned 
to attribute to their own consciousness the grandeur 
w T hich belongs of right only to the mind of the human 
race, slowly endeavoring after an equilibrium between 
its desires and the external conditions under which they 
are attainable. Hence that exaggeration, of the individual, 
and depreciation of the social man, which has become the 
cant of modern literature. Abundance c f such phenom- 
ena accompanied the rise of what was called Romanti- 
cism in Germany and France, reacting to some extent 
even upon England, and consequently America. The 
smaller poets erected themselves into a kind of guild, 



190 LIFE AND LETTERS OF JAMES GATES PERCIVAL. 

into which all were admitted who gave proof of a certain 
feebleness of character which rendered them superior to 
their grosser fellow-men. It was a society of cripples 
undertaking to teach the new generation how to walk. 
Meanwhile, the object of their generous solicitude, what 
with clinging to Mother Past's skirts, and helping itself 
by every piece of household furniture it could lay hands 
on, learned, after many a tumble, to get on its legs, and 
to use them as other generations had done before it. 
Percival belonged to this new order of bards, weak in the 
knees, and thinking it healthy exercise to climb the peaks 
of Dreamland. To the vague and misty views attaina- 
ble from those sublime summits into his own vast in- 
terior, his reports in blank verse and otherwise did ample 
justice, but failed to excite the appetite of mankind: He 
spent his life, like others of his class, in proclaiming him- 
self a neglected Columbus, ever readv to start on his 
voyage when the public would supply the means of 
building his ships. Meanwhile, to be ready at a moment's 
warning, he packs his mind pellmell like a carpet-bag, 
wraps a geologist's hammer in a shirt with a B} r ron collar, 
does up Volney's " Ruins " with an odd volume of Words- 
worth, and another of Bell's " Anatomy " in a loose sheet 
of Webster's Dictionary, jams Moore's poems between the 
leaves of Bopp's Grammer, — and forgets only such small 
matters as combs and brushes. It never seems to have 
entered his head that the gulf between genius and its 
new world is never too wide for a stout swimmer. Like 
all sentimentr lists, he reversed the process of nature, 
which makes it a part of greatness that it is a simple 
thing to itself, however much of a marvel it may be to 
other men. He discovered his own genius, as he sup- 
posed, — a thing impossible had the genius been real. 
Donne never wrote a profounder verse than 

" Who knows his virtue's name and place, hath none." 



,D LETTERS OF JAMES 

al's life was by no mea 
,rhaps, in the number • 
jeen offered him to mal 
/thing were possibly to 1 
out friends, never without 
e availed himself of them I 
f. Ticknor treating him with i t 
hich many a young scholar c; 
generously to himself. But no ' a 
whose nature had defeat worked mtc 
He was not a real, but an imagin 
attempt at suicide (as Mr. War'i j 
typical of him. He is not the fir it 3 
crossed in love, has spoken of J ( loi 
will he be the last. But that any ( 
to kill himself should put himself 1 
of being prevented, as Percival did 
Chateaubriand, the arch sentiment 
days, had the same harmless velleit 
- — enough to scare his sister ond so 
sensation, — but a very different th . 
will which would be really perilous, 
true to Nature, makes Hamlet dally 
ing fancy. Alas ! self is the one i 
talist never truly wishes to destroy 
gift Percival seems to have had, \ 
memory of the eye. What he saw 
this fitted him for a good geological 
his power of combination was, whic 
made him a great geologist, we can 
he seems to have shown but little 
His faculty of acquiring foreign toni 
so highly as Mr. Ward. W^e have 
wise inferior men who. possessed it. 
to express the same nothing in ten c 



<!S GATES PERCIVAL. 

han admired. It gives 

The best thing to be 

,t he was happy for the 

his vague pursuit of the 



THOREAU 



"1 "HAT contemporary, if he was in the fighting 
period of his life, (since Nature sets limits about 
her conscription for spiritual fields, as the state does in 
pin-.! ! warfare,) will ever forget what was somewhat 
called the " Transcendental Movement " of thirty 
o 1 Apparently set astirring by Carlyle's essays 
! ' Signs of the Times," and on " History," the final 
ore immediate impulse seemed to be given by 
" Sartor Resartus." At least the republication in Boston 
of tlat wonderful Abraham a Sancta Clara sermon on 
Learg i ext of the miserable forked radish gave the signal 
for sudden mental and moral mutiny. Ecce nunc tern- 
1 ptabile ! was shouted on all hands with every 
ty of emphasis, and by voices of every conceivable 
( T ! i\ presenting the three sexes of men, women, and 
Lady Mary Wortley Montagues. The nameless eagle of 
the tree Ygdrasil was about to sit at last, and wild-eyed 
enthusiasts rushed from all sides, each eager to thrust 
under the mystic bird that chalk egg from which the new 
and fairer Creation was to be hatched in due time. J?e- 
deunt Satumia regna, — so far was certain, though in 
what shape, or by what methods, was still a matter of 
debate. Every possible form of intellectual and physical 
dyspepsia brought forth its gospel. Bran had its proph- 
ets, and the presartorial simplicity of Adam its mar- 
tyrs, tailored impromptu from the tar-pot by incensed 
9 M 



THOREAU. 

rs, and sent forth to illustrate the " feath( 
y," as defined by Webster and Worcester. P] 
f speech was carried to a pitch that would 1 
1 away the breath of George Fox ; and even s\\ 
had its evangelists, who answered a simple inq 
;r their health with an elaborate ingenuity of in 
don that might have been honorably mentioned 
arlborough in general orders. Everybody had a 
>ion (with a capital M) to attend to everybody-( 
business. No brain but had its private maggot, t\ 
must have found pitiably short commons sometimes. 
a few impecunious zealots abjured the use of money 
less earned by other people), professing to live or 
internal revenues of the spirit. Some had an assiv 
of instant millennium so soon as hooks and eyes shov 
substituted for buttons. Communities were establ 
where everything was to be common but common-s 
Men renounced their old gods, and hesitated only wli 
to bestow their furloughed allegiance on Thor or t 
Conventions were held for every hitherto inconce. 
purpose. The belated gift of tongues, as among the 
Monarchy men, spread like a contagion, renderii 
victims incomprehensible to all Christian men ; wi 
equally so to the most distant possible heathen c 
was unexperimented, though many would have 
scribed liberally that a fair trial might be made. I 
the pentecost of Shinar. The day of utterances ] 
duced the day of rebuses and anagrams, and thcr 
nothing so simple that uncial letters and the sb 
Diphilus the Labyrinth could not turn into a 1 
Many foreign revolutionists out of work added t 
general misunderstanding their contribution of I 
English in every most ingenious form of fracture 
stood ready at a moment's notice to reform ever 
but themselves. The general motto was : — 



THOREAU. 

" And we '11 talk with them, 
And take upon 's the mystery of thin,_ 
As if we were God's spies." 

Nature Is always kind enough to give even he. 
a humorous lining. We have barely hinted at the c 
side of the affair, for the material was endless. Thiswc 
the whistle and trailing fuse of the shell, but there was 
a very ^oiid and serious kernel, full of the most deadly 
cxploiNcness. Thoughtful men divined it, but the gen- 
erality suspected nothing. The word "transcendental" 
then was the maid of all work for those who could not 
think, as " Pre-Raphaelite " has been more recently for 
people of the same limited housekeeping. The truth is, 
that there was a much nearer metaphysical relation and 
a much .lore distant aesthetic and literary relation be- 
tween Carlyle and the Apostles of the Newness, as they 
were called in New England, than has commonly been 
supposed. Both represented the reaction and revolt 
against Philisterei, a renewal of the old battle begun in 
modern times by Erasmus and Reuchlin, and continued 
by Lessing, Goethe, and, in a far narrower sense, by 
Heine in Germany, and of which Fielding, Sterne, and 
Wordsworth in different ways have been the leaders in 
England. It was simply a struggle for fresh air, in which, 
if the windows could not be opened, there was danger 
that panes would be broken, though painted with images 
of saints and martyrs. Light colored by these reverend 
effigies was none the more respirable for being pictu- 
resque. There is only one thing better than tradition, and 
that is the original and eternal life out of which all tra- 
dition takes its rise. It was this life which the reformers 
demanded, with more or less clearness of consciousness 
and expression, life in politics, life in literature, life in 
religion. Of what use to import a gospel from Judaaa, 
if we leave behind the soul that made it possible, the God 



196 THOREAU. 

who keeps it forever real and present % Surely Abana 
and Pharpar are better than Jordan, if a living faitji be 
mixed with those waters and none with these. 

Scotch Presbyterianism as a motive of spiritual prog- 
ress was dead ; New England Puritanism was in like 
manner dead ; in other words, Protestantism had made 
its fortune and no longer protested ; but till Carlyle 
spoke out in the Old World and Emerson in the New, 
no one had dared to proclaim, Le roi est mart: vive le roi! 
The meaning of which proclamation was essentially 
this : the vital spirit has long since departed out of this 
form once so kingly, and the great seal has been in com- 
mission long enough ; but meanwhile the soul of man, 
from which all power emanates and to which it reverts, 
still survives in undiminished royalty; God still sur- 
vives, little as you gentlemen of the Commission seem 
to be aware of it, — nay, may possibly outlive the whole 
of you, incredible as it may appear. The truth is, that 
both Scotch Presbyterianism and New England Puritan- 
ism made their new avatar in Carlyle and Emerson, the 
heralds of their formal decease, and the tendency of the 
one toward Authority and of the other toward Indepen- 
dency might have been prophesied by whoever had 
studied history. The necessity was not so much in the 
men as in the principles they represented and the tradi- 
tions which overruled them. The Puritanism of the 
past found its unwilling poet in Hawthorne, the rarest 
creative imagination of the century, the rarest in some 
ideal respects since Shakespeare ; but the Puritanism 
that cannot die, the Puritanism that made New England 
what it is, and is destined to make America what it. 
should be, found its voice in Emerson. Though holding 
himself aloof from all active partnership in movements 
of reform, he has been the sleeping partner who has 
supplied a great part of their capital. 



THOREAU. 

The artistic range of Emerson is narrow 
well-read critic must feel at once ; and s> it v 

iEschylus, so is that of Dante, so is that of ! 
so is that of Schiller, so is that of nearly e\ 
excej)t Shakespeare ; but there is a gauge of heighl 
less than of breadth, of individuality as well as of 
comj'' hensiveness, and, above all, there is the standard 
of genetic power, the test of the masculine as distin- 
guiir m the receptive minds. There are staminate 

plai > in literature, that make no fine show of fruit, but 
wit I hose pollen, quintessence of fructifying gold, 
the gar* len had been barren. Emerson's mind is emphat- 
ic; ae of these, and there is no man to whom our 
aesthetic culture owes so much. The Puritan revolt had 
made us ecclesiastically, and the Revolution politically 
independent, but we were still socially and intellectually 
moored to English thought, till Emerson cut the cable 
and gave us a chance at the dangers and the glories of 
blue v iter. No man young enough to have felt it can 
or cease to be grateful for, the mental and moral 
which he received from the writings of his high- 
l and brave-spirited countryman. That we agree 
with him, or that he always agrees with himself, is aside 
he- question ; but that he arouses in us something 
we are the better for having awakened, whether 
that something be of opposition or assent, that he 
speaks always to what is highest and least selfish in us, 
few Americans of the generation younger than his own 
would be disposed to deny. His oration before the Phi 
Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, some thirty years 
was an event without any former parallel in our 
literary annals, a scene to be always treasured in the 
memory for its picturesqueness and its inspiration. 
"What crowded and breathless aisles, what windows clus- 
tering with eager heads, what enthusiasm of approval, 



198 THOREAU. 

w hat grim gj&gi ( e of foregone dissent ! It was our Yan- 
Von of a lecture by Abelard, our Harvard par- 
allel to the last public appearances of Schelling. 

id that the Transcendental Movement was the 
cant spirit of Puritanism seeking a new outlet and 
an escape from forms and creeds which compressed 
rather than expressed it. In its motives, its preaching, 
and its results, it differed radically from the doctrine of 
Carlyle. The Scotchman, with all his genius, and his 
humor gigantesque as that of Rabelais, has grown shrill- 
er and shriller with years, degenerating sometimes into a 
common scold, and emptying very unsavory vials of wrath 
on the head of the sturdy British Socrates of worldly 
common-sense. The teaching of Emerson tended much 
more exclusively to self-culture and the independent de- 
velopment of the individual man. It seemed to many 
almost Pythagorean in its voluntary seclusion from com- 
monwealth affairs. Both Carlyle and Emerson were 
disciples of Goethe, but Emerson in a far truer sense ; 
and while the one, from his bias toward the eccentric, 
has degenerated more and more into mannerism, the 
other has clarified steadily toward perfection of style, — ■ 
exquisite fineness of material, unobtrusive lowness of tone 
and simplicity of fashion, the most high-bred garb of 
expression. Whatever may be said of his thought, 
nothing can be finer than the delicious limpidness of his 
phrase. If it was ever questionable whether democracy 
could develop a gentleman, the problem has been affirma- 
tively solved at last. Carlyle, in his cynicism and his 
admiration of force in and for itself, has become at last 
positively inhuman ; Emerson, reverencing strength, 
seeking the highest outcome of the individual, has founoi 
that society and politics are also main elements in the 
attainment of the desired end, and has drawn steadily 
manward and worldward. The two men represent re- 



THOREAU. 

spectively those grand personifica 
iEschylus, Bia and Kparos. 

Among the pistillate plants kinc i 

Emersonian pollen, Thoreau is tlm. 3 

able ; and it is something eminc 
posthnmous works should be offen u 

they are strawberries from his ow 

lar mixture of varieties, indeed, the^ ^ ^ , — alpine, some 
of them, with the flavor of rare mountain air ; others 
wood, tasting of sunny roadside banks or shy openings 
in the forest ; and not a few seedlings swollen hugely by 
culture, but lacking the fine natural aroma of the more 
modest kinds. Strange books these are of his, and in- 
teresting in many ways, — instructive chiefly as showing 
how considerable a crop may be raised on a comparative- 
ly narrow close of mind, and how much a man may 
make of his life if he will assiduously follow it, though 
perhaps never truly finding it at last. 

We have jiist been renewing our recollection of Mr. 
Thoreau's writings, and have read through his six vol- 
umes in the order of their production. We shall try to 
give an adequate report of their impression upon us 
both as critic and as mere reader. He seems to us to 
have been a man with so high a conceit of himself that 
he accepted without questioning, and insisted on our 
accepting, his defects and weaknesses of character as 
virtues and powers peculiar to himself. Was he indolent, 
he finds none of the activities which attract or employ 
the rest of mankind worthy of him. Was he wanting 
in the qualities that make success, it is success that 
is contemptible, and not himself that lacks persistency 
and purpose. Was he poor, money was an unmixed 
evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doing 
good as one of the weakest of superstitions. To be of 
use was with him the most killing bait of the wily 



200 THOREAU. 

tempter Uselessness. He had no faculty of generaliza- 
tion from dutside of himself, or at least no experience 
which would supply the material of such, and he makes 
his own whim the law, his own range the horizon of the 
universe. He condemns a world, the hollowness of 
whose satisfactions he had never had the means of test- 
ing, and we recognize Apemantus behind the mask of 
Timon. He had little active imagination ; of the recep- 
tive he had much. His appreciation is of the highest 
quality ; his critical power, from want of continuity of 
mind, very limited and inadequate. He somewhere cites 
a simile from Ossian, as an example of the superiority 
of the old poetry to the new, though, even were the 
historic evidence less convincing, the sentimental melan- 
choly of those poems should be conclusive of their mod- 
ernness. He had no artistic power such as controls a 
great work to the serene balance of completeness, but 
exquisite mechanical skill in the shaping of sentences 
and paragraphs, or (more rarely) short bits of verse for 
the expression of a detached thought, sentiment, or 
image. His works give one the feeling of a sky full of 
stars, — something impressive and exhilarating certainly, 
something high overhead and freckled thickly with spots 
of isolated brightness ; but whether these have any 
mutual relation with each other, or have any concern 
with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter 
of conjecture, — astrology as yet, and not astronomy. 

It is curious, considering what Thoreau afterwards 
became, that he was not by nature an observer. He 
only saw the things he looked for, and was less poet 
than naturalist. Till he built his Waldcn shanty, he 
did not know that the hickoiy grew in Concord. Till 
he went to Maine, he had never seen phosphorescent 
wood, a phenomenon early familiar to most country 
boys. At forty he speaks of the seeding of the pine as 



THOREAU. 201 

a new discovery, though one should have thought that 
its gold-dust of blowing pollen might have earlier drawn 
his eye. Neither his attention nor his genius was of 
the spontaneous kiud. He discovered nothing. He 
thought everything a discovery of his own, from moon- 
light to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels. 
This is a defect in his character, but one of his chief 
charms as a writer. Everything grows fresh under his 
hand. He delved in his mind and nature ; he planted 
them with all manner of native and foreign seeds, and 
reaped assiduously. He was not merely solitary, he 
would be isolated, and succeeded at last in almost per- 
suading himself that he was autochthonous. He valued 
everything in proportion as he fancied it to be exclusive- 
ly his own. He complains in " Walden," that there is 
no one in Concord with whom he could talk of Oriental 
literature, though the man was living within two miles 
of his hut who had introduced him to it. This intel- 
lectual selfishness becomes sometimes almost painful in 
reading him. He lacked that generosity of " communi- 
cation " which Johnson admired in Burke. De Quincey 
tells us that Wordsworth was impatient when any one 
else spoke of mountains, as if he had a peculiar property 
in them. And we can readily understand why it should 
be so : no one is satisfied with another's appreciation of 
his mistress. But Thoreau seems to have prized a lofty 
way of thinking (often we should be inclined to call it a 
remote one) not so much because it was good in itself as 
because he wished few to share it with him. It seems 
now and then as if he did not seek to lure others up 
" above our lower region of turmoil," but to leave his 
own name cut on the mountain peak as the first climber. 
This itch of originality infects his thought and style. 
To be misty is not to be mystic. He turns common- 
places end for end, and fancies it makes something new 
9* 



202 THOEEAU. 

of them. As we walk down Park Street, our eye is 
caught by Dr. Windship's dumb-bells, one of which 
bears an inscription testifying that it is the heaviest 
ever put up at arm's length by any athlete ; and in 
reading Mr. Thoreau's books we cannot help feeling as 
if he sometimes invited our attention to a particular 
sophism or paradox as the biggest yet maintained by 
any single writer. He seeks, at all risks, for perversity 
of thought, and revives the age of concetti while he 
fancies himself going back to a pre-classical nature. " A 
day," he says, "passed in the society of those Greek 
sages, such as described in the Banquet of Xenophon, 
would not be comparable with the dry wit of decayed 
cranberry-vines and the fresh Attic salt of the moss- 
beds." It is not so much the True that he loves as the 
Out-of-the-Way. As the Brazen Age shows itself in 
other men by exaggeration of phrase, so in him by ex- 
travagance of statement. He wishes always to trump 
your suit and to ruff when you least expect it. Do you 
love Nature because she is beautiful % He will find a 
better argument in her ugliness. Are you tired of the 
artificial man % He instantly dresses you up an ideal in 
a Penobscot Indian, and attributes to this creature of 
his otherwise-mindedness as peculiarities things that are 
common to all woodsmen, white or red, and this simply 
because he has not studied the pale-faced variety. 

This notion of an absolute originality, as if one could 
have a patent-right in it, is an absurdity. A man can- 
not escape in thought, any more than he can in language, 
from the past and the present. As no one ever invents 
a word, and yet language somehow grows by general 
contribution and necessity, so it is with thought. Mr. 
Thoreau seems to us to insist in public on going back to 
flint and steel, when there is a match-box in his pocket 
which he knows very well how to use at a pinch. Origi- 



THOREAU. 203 

nality consists in power of digesting and assimilating 
thought, so that they become part of our life and sub- 
stance. Montaigne, for example, is one of the most 
original of authors, though he helped himself to ideas in 
every direction. But they turn to blood and coloring in 
his style, and give a freshness of complexion that is for- 
ever charming. In Thoreau much seems yet to be 
foreign and unassimilated, showing itself in symptoms 
of indigestion. A preacher-up of Nature, we now and 
then detect under the surly and stoic garb something of 
the sophist and the sentimentalizes We are far from 
implying that this was conscious on his part. But it is 
much easier for a man to impose on himself when he 
measures only with himself. A greater familiarity with 
ordinary men would have done Thoreau good, by show- 
ing him how many fine qualities are common to the race. 
The radical vice of his theory of life was, that he con- 
founded physical with spiritual remoteness from men. 
One is far enough withdrawn from his fellows if he keep 
himself clear of their weaknesses. He is not so truly 
withdrawn as exiled, if he refuse to share in their 
strength. " Solitude," says Cowley, " can be well fitted 
and set right but upon a very few persons. They must 
have enough knowledge of the world to see the vanity 
of it, and enough virtue to despise all vanity." It is 
a morbid self-consciousness that pronounces the world 
of men empty and worthless before trying it, the 
instinctive evasion of one who is sensible of some 
innate weakness, and retorts the accusation of it before 
any has made it but himself. To a healthy mind, 
the world is a constant challenge of opportunity. Mr. 
Thoreau had not a healthy mind, or he would not 
have been so fond of prescribing. His whole life 
was a search for the doctor. The old mystics had a 
wiser sense of what the world was worth. They or- 



204 THOEEAU. 

dained a severe apprenticeship to law, and even ceremo- 
nial, in order to the gaining of freedom and mastery over 
these. Seven years of service for Rachel were to be 
rewarded at last with Leah. Seven other years of faith- 
fulness with her were to win them at last the true bride 
of their souls. Active Life was with them the only path 
to the Contemplative. 

Thoreau had no humor, and this implies that he was 
a sorry logician. Himself an artist in rhetoric, he con- 
founds thought with style when he undertakes to speak 
of the latter. He was forever talking of getting away 
from the world, but he must be always near enough to 
it, nay, to the Concord corner of it, to feel the impres- 
sion he makes there. He verifies the shrewd remark of 
Sainte-Beuve, " On touche encore a son temps et tres- 
fort, meme quand on le repousse." This egotism of his 
is a Stylites pillar after all, a seclusion which keeps him 
in the public eye. The dignity of man is an excellent 
thing, but therefore to hold one's self too sacred and 
precious is the reverse of excellent. There is something 
delightfully absurd in six volumes addressed to a world 
of such "vulgar fellows" as Thoreau affirmed his fellow- 
men to be. We once had a glimpse of a genuine solitary 
who spent his winters one hundred and fifty miles be- 
yond all human communication, and there dwelt with 
his rifle as his only confidant. Compared with this, the 
shanty on Walden Pond has something the air, it must 
be confessed, of the Hermitage of La Chevrette. We do 
not believe that the way to a true cosmopolitanism 
carries one into the woods or the society of musquashes. 
Perhaps the narrowest provincialism is that of Self ; that 
of Kleinwinkel is nothing to it. The natural man, like 
the singing birds, comes out of the forest as inevitably 
as the natural bear and the wildcat stick there. To seek 
to be natural implies a consciousness that forbids all 



THOREAU. 205 

naturalness forever. It is as easy — and no easier — to 
be natural in a salon as in a swamp, if one do not aim at 
it, for what we call unnaturalness always has its spring 
in a man's thinking too much about himself. " It is 
impossible," said Turgot, " for a vulgar man to be sim- 
ple." 

We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimental- 
ism about Nature as a mark of disease. It is one more 
symptom of the general liver-complaint. To a man of 
wholesome constitution the wilderness is well enough 
for a mood or a vacation, but not for a habit of life. 
Those who have most loudly advertised their passion for 
seclusion and their intimacy with nature, from Petrarch 
down, have been mostly sentimentalists, unreal men, 
misanthropes on the spindle side, solacing an uneasy 
suspicion of themselves by professing contempt for their 
kind. They make demands on the world in advance 
proportioned to their inward measure of their own merit, 
and are angry that the world pays only by the visible 
measure of performance. It is true of Rousseau, the 
modern founder of the sect, true of Saint Pierre, his 
intellectual child, and of Chateaubriand, his grandchild, 
the inventor, we might almost say, of the primitive forest, 
and who first was touched by the solemn falling of a tree 
from natural decay in the windless silence of the woods. 
It is a very shallow view that affirms trees and rocks to 
be healthy, and cannot see that men in communities 
are just as true to the laws of their organization and 
destiny; that can tolerate the puffin and the fox, but 
not the fool and the knave ; that would shun politics 
because of its demagogues, and snuff up the stench of 
the obscene fungus. The divine life of Nature is more 
wonderful, more various, more sublime in man than 
in any other of her works, and the wisdom that is gained 
by commerce with men, as Montaigne and Shakespeare 



206 THOREAU. 

gained it, or with one's own soul among men, as Dante, 
is the most delightful, as it is the most precious, of all. 
In outward nature it is still man that interests us, and 
we care far less for the things seen than the way in 
which poetic eyes like Wordsworth's or Thoreau's see 
them, and the reflections they cast there. To hear the 
to-do that is often made over the simple fact that a man 
sees the image of himself in the outward world, one 
is reminded of a savage when he for the first time 
catches a glimpse of himself in a looking-glass. " Ven- 
erable child of Nature," we are tempted to say, "to 
whose science in the invention of the tobacco-pipe, to 
whose art in the tattooing of thine undegenerate hide 
not yet enslaved by tailors, we are slowly striving to 
climb back, the miracle thou beholdest is sold in my 
unhappy country for a shilling ! " If matters go on as 
they have done, and everybody must needs blab of all 
the favors that have been done him by roadside and 
river-brink and woodland walk, as if to kiss and tell 
were no longer treachery, it will be a positive refresh- 
ment to meet a man who is as superbly indifferent to 
Nature as she is to him. By and by we shall have John 
Smith, of No. -12 -12th Street, advertising that he 
is not the J. S. who saw a cow-lily on Thursday last, as 
he never saw one in his life, would not see one if he 
could, and is prepared to prove an alibi on the day 
in question. 

Solitary communion with Nature does not seem to 
have been sanitary or sweetening in its influence on 
Thoreau's character. On the contrary, his letters show 
him more cynical as he grew older. While he studied 
with respectful attention the minks and woodchucks, 
his neighbors, he looked with utter contempt on the 
august drama of destiny of which his country was the 
scene, and on which the curtain had already risen. He 



THOREAU. 207 

was converting us back to a state of nature " so elo- 
quently," as Voltaire said of Rousseau, "that he almost 
persuaded us to go on all fours," while the wiser fates 
were making it possible for us to walk erect for the first 
time. Had he conversed more with his fellows, his 
sympathies would have widened with the assurance that 
his peculiar genius had more appreciation, and his writ- 
ings a larger circle of readers, or at least a warmer one, 
than he dreamed of. We have the highest testimony * 
to the natural sweetness, sincerity, and nobleness of his 
temper, and in his books an equally irrefragable one to 
the rare quality of his mind. He was not a strong 
thinker, but a sensitive feeler. Yet his mind strikes us 
as cold and wintry in its purity. A light snow has 
fallen everywhere in which he seems to come on the 
track of the shier sensations that would elsewhere leave 
no trace. We think greater compression would have done 
more for his fame. A feeling of sameness comes over us 
as we read so much. Trifles are recorded with an over- 
minute punctuality and conscientiousness of detail. He 
records the state of his personal thermometer thirteen 
times a day. We cannot help thinking sometimes of the 
man who 

" Watches, starves, freezes, and sweats 
To learn but catechisms and alphabets 
Of unconcerning things, matters of fact," 

and sometimes of the saying of the Persian poet, that 
" when the owl would boast, he boasts of catching mice 
at the edge of a hole." We could readily part with 
some of his affectations. It was well enough for Py- 
thagoras to say, once for all, "When I was Euphorbus 
at the siege of Troy " ; not so well for Thoreau to trav- 
esty it into " When I was a shepherd on the plains of 

* Mr. Emerson, in the Biographical Sketch prefixed to the " Excur- 
sions." 



208 THOREAU. 

Assyria." A naive thing said over again is anything but 
naive. But with every exception, there is no writing 
comparable with Thoreau's in kind, that is comparable 
with it in degree where it is best ; where it disengages 
itself, that is, from the tangled roots and dead leaves of 
a second-hand Orientalism, and runs limpid and smooth 
and broadening as it runs, a mirror for whatever is grand 
and lovely in both worlds. 

George Sand says neatly, that " Art is not a study of 
positive reality," [actuality were the fitter word,) "but a 
seeking after ideal truth." It would be doing very inad- 
equate justice to Thoreau if we left it to be inferred that 
this ideal element did not exist in him, and that too in 
larger proportion, if less obtrusive, than his nature-wor- 
ship. He took nature as the mountain-path to an ideal 
world. If the path wind a good deal, if he record too 
faithfully every trip over a root, if he botanize somewhat 
wearisomely, he gives us now and then superb outlooks 
from some jutting crag, and brings us out at last into an 
illimitable ether, where the breathing is not difficult for 
those who have any true touch of the climbing spirit. 
His shanty-life was a mere impossibility, so far as his 
own conception of it goes, as an entire independency of 
mankind. The tub of Diogenes had a sounder bottom. 
Thoreau's experiment actually presupposed all that com- 
plicated civilization which it theoretically abjured. He 
squatted on another man's land ; he borrows an axe ; his 
boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his 
lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state's 
evidence against him as an accomplice in the sin of that 
artificial civilization which rendered it possible that such 
a person as Henry D. Thoreau should exist at all. Mag- 
nis tamen excidit ausis. His aim was a noble and a useful 
one, in the direction of " plain living and high thinking." 
It was a practical sermon on Emerson's text that " things 



THOREAU. 209 

are in the saddle and ride mankind," an attempt to 
solve Carlyle's problem (condensed from Johnson) of 
"lessening your denominator." His whole life was a 
rebuke of the waste and aimlessness of our American 
luxury, which is an abject enslavement to tawdry up- 
holstery. He had " fine translunary things " in him. 
His better style as a writer is in keeping with the 
simplicity and purity of his life. We have said that 
his range was narrow, but to be a master is to be a mas- 
ter. He had caught his English at its living source, 
among the poets and prose-writers of its best days ; his 
literature was extensive and recondite ; his quotations 
are always nuggets of the purest ore : there are sentences 
of his as perfect as anything in the language, and thoughts 
as clearly crystallized ; his metaphors and images are al- 
ways fresh from the soil ; he had watched Nature like a 
detective who is to go upon the stand ; as we read him, 
it seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and be- 
come its own Montaigne ; we look at the landscape as in 
a Claude Lorraine glass ; compared with his, all other 
books of similar aim, even White's " Selborne," seem dry 
as a country clergyman's meteorological journal in an old 
almanac. He belongs with Donne and Browne and No- 
valis ; if not with the originally creative men, with the 
scarcely smaller class who are peculiar, and whose leaves 
shed their invisible thought-seed like ferns. 



IT 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 



ARE we really, then, to believe the newspapers for 
once, and to doff onr critical nightcaps, in which 
we have comfortably overslept many similar rumors and 
false alarms, to welcome the advent of a new poet ? New 
poets, to our thinking, are not very common, and the 
soft columns of the press often make dangerous conces- 
sions, for which the marble ones of Horace's day were 
too stony-hearted. Indeed, we have some well-grounded 
doubts whether England is precisely the country from 
which we have a right to expect that most precious of 
gifts just now. There is hardly enough fervor of political 
life there at present to ripen anything but the fruits of 
the literary forcing-house, so fair outwardly and so flavor- 
less compared with those which grow in the hardier open 
air of a vigorous popular sentiment. Mere wealth of 
natural endowment is not enough ; there must be also 
the co-operation of. the time, of the public genius roused 
to a consciousness of itself by the necessity of asserting 
or defending the vital principle on which that conscious- 
ness rests, in order that a poet may rise to the highest 
level of his vocation. The great names of the last gen- 
eration — Scott, Wordsworth, Byron — represent moods 
of national thought and feeling, and are therefore more 
or less truly British poets ; just as Goethe, in w T hose ca- 
pacious nature, open to every influence of earth and sky, 
the spiritual fermentation of the eighteenth century set- 
tled and clarified, is a European one. A sceptic might 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 211 

say, we think, with some justice, that poetry in England 
was passing now, if it. have not already passed, into one 
of those periods of mere art without any intense convic- 
tions to back it, which lead inevitably, and by ?o long 
gradation, to the mannered and artificial. Browning, by 
far the richest nature of the time, becomes more di'ncult, 
draws nearer to the all-for-point fashion of the conceltisti, 
with every poem he writes ; the dainty trick of Tenny- 
son cloys when caught by a whole generation of versi- 
fiers, as the style of a great poet never can be ; and we 
have a foreboding that Clough, imperfect as he was in 
many respects, and dying before he had subdued his sen- 
sitive temperament to the sterner requirements of his 
art, will be thought a hundred years hence to have been 
the truest expression in verse of the moral and intellec- 
tual tendencies, the doubt and struggle towards settled 
convictions, of the period in which he lived. To make 
beautiful conceptions immortal by exquisiteness of phrase, 
is to be a poet, no doubt ; but to be a new poet is to feel 
and to utter that immanent life of things without which 
the utmost perfection of mere form is at best only wax 
or marble. He who can do both is the great poet. 

Over " Chastelard, a Tragedy," we need not spend 
much time. It is at best but the school exercise of a 
young poet learning to write, and who reproduces in his 
copy-book, more or less travestied, the copy that has been 
set for him at the page's head by the authors he most 
admires. Grace and even force of expression are not 
wanting, but there is the obscurity which springs from 
want of definite intention ; the characters are vaguely 
outlined from memory, not drawn firndy from the living 
and the nude in actual experience of life ; the working 
of passion is an a priori abstraction from a scheme in the 
author's mind ; and there is no thought, but only a ve- 
hement grasping after thought. The hand is the hand 



212 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

of Swinburne, but the voice is the voice of Browning. 
With here and there a pure strain of sentiment, a genuine 
touch of nature, the effect of the whole is unpleasant with 
the faults of the worst school of modern poetry, — the 
phys* sally intense school, as we should be inclined to call 
it, of '.hich Mrs. Browning's " Aurora Leigh " is the worst 
example, whose muse is a fast young woman with the 
lavish ornament and somewhat overpowering perfume of 
the demi-monde, and which pushes expression to the last 
gasp of sensuous exhaustion. They forget that convul- 
sion is not energy, and that words, to hold fire, must first 
catch it from vehement heat of thought, while no arti- 
ficial fervors of phrase can make the charm work back- 
ward to kindle the mind of writer or reader. An over- 
mastering passion no longer entangles the spiritual being 
of its victim in the burning toils of a retribution fore- 
doomed in its own nature, purifying us with the terror 
and pity of a soul in its extremity, as the great masters 
were wont to set it before us ; no, it must be fleshly, 
corporeal, must " bite with small white teeth " and draw 
blood, to satisfy the craving of our modern inquisitors, 
who torture language instead of wooing it to confess 
the secret of its witchcraft. That books written on this 
theory should be popular, is one of the worst signs of the 
times ; that they should be praised by the censors of 
literature shows how seldom criticism goes back to first 
principles, or is even aware of them, — how utterly it 
has forgotten its most earnest function of demolishing the 
high places where the unclean rites of Baal and Ashta- 
roth usurp on the worship of the one only True and Pure. 
" Atalanta in Calydon " is in every respect better than 
its forerunner. It is a true poem, and seldom breaks 
from the maidenly reserve which should characterize the 
higher forms of poetry, even in the keenest energy of 
expression. If the blank verse be a little mannered and 



SWINBUENE'S TRAGEDIES. 213 

stiff, reminding one of Landor in his attempts to repro- 
duce the antique, the lyrical parts are lyrical in the 
highest sense, graceful, flowing, and generally simple in 
sentiment and phrase. There are some touches of nature 
in the mother's memories of Althea, so sweetly pathetic 
that they go as right to the heart as they came from it, 
and are neither Greek nor English, but broadly human. 
And yet, when we had read the book through, we felt as 
if we were leaving a world of shadows, inhabited by less 
substantial things than that nether realm of Homer 
where the very eidolon of Achilles is still real to us in its 
longings and regrets. These are not characters, but out- 
lines after the Elgin marbles in the thinnest manner of 
Flaxman. There is not so much blood in the whole of 
them as would warm the little finger of one of Shake- 
speare's living and breathing conceptions. We could 
not help thinking of those exquisite verses addressed by 
Schiller to Goethe, in which, while he expresses a half- 
truth so eloquently as almost to make it seem a whole 
one, he touches unconsciously the weak point of their 
common striving after a Grecian instead of a purely hu- 
man ideal. 

" Doch leicht gezimmert nur ist Thespis Wagen, 
Und er ist gleich dem achei'ont'schen Kahn; 
Nur Schatten und Idole kann er tragen, 
Und draugt das rohe Leben sieh heran, 
So droht das leichte Fahrzeug umzuschlagen 
Das nur die fluent' gen Geister fassen kann; 
Der Schein soil nie die Wirklichkeit erreiclien 
Und siegt Natur, so muss die Kunst entweichen." 

The actors in the drama are unreal and shadowy, the 
motives which actuate them alien to our modern modes 
of thought and conceptions of character. To a Greek, 
the element of Fate, with which his imagination was 
familiar, while it heightened the terror of the catastrophe, 
would have supplied the place of that impulse in mere 



214 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

human nature which our habit of mind demands for its 
satisfaction. The fulfilment of an oracle, the anger of 
a deity, the arbitrary doom of some blind and purpose- 
less power superior to man, the avenging of blood to 
appease an injured ghost, any one of these might make 
that seem simply natural to a contemporary of Sopho- 
cles which is intelligible to us only by study and reflec- 
tion. It is not a little curious that Shakespeare should 
have made the last of the motives we have just men- 
tioned, and which was conclusive for Orestes, insufficient 
for Hamlet, who so perfectly typifies the introversion 
and complexity of modern thought as compared with 
ancient, in dealing with the problems of life and action. 
It was not perhaps without intention (for who may 
venture to assume a want of intention in the world's 
highest poetic genius at its full maturity ?) that Shake- 
speare brings in his hero fresh from the University 
of Wittenberg, where Luther, who entailed upon us the 
responsibility of private judgment, had been Professor. 
The dramatic motive in the " Electra " and " Hamlet " 
is essentially the same, but what a difference between 
the straightforward bloody-mindedness of Orestes and 
the metaphysical punctiliousness of the Dane ! Yet each 
was natural in his several way, and each would have 
been unintelligible to the audience for which the other 
was intended. That Fate which the Greeks made to 
operate from without, we recognize at work within in 
some vice of character or hereditary predisposition. 
Hawthorne, the most profoundly ideal genius of these 
latter days, was continually returning, more or less 
directly, to this theme; and his " Marble Faun," whether 
consciously or not, illustrates that invasion of the a3S- 
thetic by the moral which has confused art by dividing 
its allegiance, and dethroned the old dynasty without 
as yet firmly establishing the new in an acknowledged 
legitimacy. 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 215 

te Atalanta in Calydon " shows that poverty of thought 
and profusion of imagery which are at once the defect 
and the compensation of all youthful poetry, even of 
Shakespeare's. It seems a paradox to say that there 
can be too much poetry in a poem, and yet this is a 
faidt with which all poets begin, and which some never 
get over. But "Atalanta" is hopefully distinguished, 
in a rather remarkable way, from most early attempts, 
by a sense of form and proportion, which, if seconded by 
a seasonable ripening of other faculties, as we may fair- 
ly expect, gives promise of rare achievement hereafter. 
Mr. Swinburne's power of assimilating style, which is, 
perhaps, not so auspicious a symptom, strikes its as 
something marvellous. The argument of his poem, in 
its quaint archaism, would not need the change of a 
word or in the order of a period to have been foisted on 
Sir Thomas Malory as his own composition. The choos- 
ing a theme which iEschylus had handled in one of his 
lost tragedies is justified by a certain iEschylean flavor 
in the treatment. The opening, without deserving to be 
called a mere imitation, recalls that of the "Agamemnon," 
and the chorus has often an imaginative lift in it, an 
ethereal charm of phrase, of which it is the highest 
praise to say that it reminds us of him who soars over 
the other Greek tragedians like an eagle. 

But in spite of many merits, we cannot help asking 
ourselves, as we close the book, whether "Atalanta" can 
be called a success, and if so, whether it be a success in 
the right direction. The poem reopens a question which 
in some sort touches the very life of modern literature. 
We do not mean to renew the old quarrel of Fontenelle's 
day as to the comparative merits of ancients and mod- 
erns. That is an affair of taste, which does not admit 
of any authoritative settlement. Our concern is about 
a principle which certainly demands a fuller discussion, 



216 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

and which is important enough to deserve it. Do we 
show our appreciation of the Greeks most wisely in 
attempting the mechanical reproduction of their forms, 
or by endeavoring to comj3rehend the thoughtful spirit of 
full-grown manhood in which they wrought, to kindle 
ourselves by the emulation of it, and to bring it to bear 
with all its plastic force upon our wholly new conditions 
of life and thought % It seems to us that the question is 
answered by the fact, patent in the history of all the fine 
arts, that every attemjDt at reproducing a bygone excel- 
lence by external imitation of it, or even by applying the 
rules which analytic criticism has formulated from the 
study of it, has resulted in producing the artificial, and 
not the artistic. That most subtile of all essences in 
physical organization, which eludes chemist, anatomist, 
and microscopist, the life, is in aesthetics not less shy of 
the critic, and will not come forth in obedience to his 
most learned spells, for the very good reason that it 
cannot, because in all works of art it is the joint product 
of the artist and of the time. Faust may believe he is 
gazing on "the face that launched a thousand ships," 
but Mephistopheles knows very well that it is only 
shadows that he has the skill to conjure. He is not 
merely the spirit that ever denies, but the spirit also of 
discontent with the present, that material in wdiich every 
man shall work who will achieve realities and not their 
hollow semblance. The true anachronism, in our opin- 
ion, is not in Shakespeare's making Ulysses talk as Lord 
Bacon might, but in attempting to make him speak in a 
dialect of thought utterly dead to all present compre- 
hension. Ulysses w r as the type of long-headedness ; and 
the statecraft of an Ithacan cateran would have seemed 
as childish to the age of Elizabeth and Burleigh as it 
was naturally sufficing to the first hearers of Homer. 
Ulysses, living in Florence during the fifteenth century, 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 217 

might have been Macchiavelli ; in France, during the 
seventeenth, Cardinal Richelieu ; in America, during the 
nineteenth, Abraham Lincoln, but not Ulysses. Truth 
to nature can be reached ideally, never historically ; 
it must be a study from the life, and not from the scho- 
liasts. Theocritus lets us into the secret of his good 
poetry, when he makes Daphnis tell us that he preferred 
his rock with a view of the Siculian Sea to the kingdom 
of Pelops. 

It is one of the marvels of the human mind, this 
sorcery which the fiend of technical imitation weaves 
about his victims, giving a phantasmal Helen to their 
arms, and making an image of the brain seem substance. 
Men still pain themselves to write Latin verses, matching 
their wooden bits of phrase together as children do dis- 
sected maps, and measuring the value of what they have 
done, not by any standard of intrinsic merit, bat by the 
difficulty of doing it. Petrarch expected to be known 
to posterit}^ by his Africa. Gray hoped to make a Latin 
poem his monument. Goethe, who was classic in the 
only way it is now possible to be classic, in his " Her- 
mann and Dorothea," and at least Propertian in his 
" Roman Idyls," wasted his time and thwarted his crea- 
tive energy on the mechanical mock-antique of an un- 
readable "Achilleis." Landor prized his waxen " Ge- 
birus Rex " above all the natural fruits of his mind ; 
and we have no doubt that, if some philosopher should 
succeed in accomplishing Paracelsus's problem of an 
artificial homunculus, he would dote on this misbegotten 
babe of his science, and think him the only genius of the 
family. We cannot over-estimate the value of some of 
the ancient classics, but a certain amount of superstition 
about Greek and Latin has come down to us from the 
revival of learning, and seems to hold in mortmain the 
intellects of whoever has, at some time, got a smattering 
10 



218 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

of them. Men quote a platitude in either of those 
tongues with a relish of conviction as droll to the un- 
initiated as the knighthood of free-masonry. Horace 
Walpole's nephew, the Earl of Orford, when he was in 
his cups, used to have Statius read aloud to him every 
night for two hours by a tipsy tradesman, whose hic- 
cupings threw in here and there a kind of caesural pause, 
and found some strange mystery of sweetness in the dis- 
quantitied syllables. So powerful is this hallucination 
that w r e can conceive offestina lente as the favorite maxim 
of a Mississippi steamboat captain, and apiarov fiev vdoop 
cited as conclusive by a gentleman for whom the bottle 
before him reversed the w r onder of the stereoscope, and 
substituted the Gascon v for the b in binocular. 

Something of this singular superstition has infected the 
minds of those who confound the laws of conventional 
limitation wdiich governed the practice of Greek authors 
in dramatic composition — laws adapted to the habits 
and traditions and preconceptions of their audience — 
with that sense of ideal form which made the Greeks 
masters in art to all succeeding generations. Aristoph- 
anes is beyond question the highest type of pure comedy, 
etherealizing his humor by the infusion, or intensifying 
it by the contrast of poetry, and deodorizing the person- 
ality of his sarcasm by a sprinkle from the clearest 
springs of fancy. His satire, aimed as it was at typical 
characteristics, is as fresh as ever ; but we doubt whether 
an Aristophanic drama, retaining its exact form, but 
adapted to present events and personages, would keep 
the stage as it is kept by " The Rivals," for example, 
immeasurably inferior as that is in every element of 
genius except the prime one of liveliness. Something 
similar in purpose to the parabasis was essayed in one, 
at least, of the comedies of Beaumont and Fletcher, and 
in our time by Tieck ; but it took, of necessity, a differ- 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 219 

ent form of expression, and does not seem, to have been 
successful. Indeed, the fact that what is called the 
legitimate drama of modern times in England, Spain, 
and France has been strictly a growth, and not a manu- 
facture, that in each country it took a different form, 
and that, in all, the period of its culminating and be- 
ginning to decline might be measured by a generation, 
seems to point us toward some natural and inevitable 
law of human nature, and to show that, while the prin- 
ciples of art are immutable, their application must ac- 
commodate itself to the material supplied them by the 
time and by the national character and traditions. The 
Spanish tragedy inclines more toward the lyrical, the 
French toward the epical, the English toward the histor- 
ical, in the representation of real life ; the Spanish and 
English agree in the Teutonic peculiarity of admitting 
the humorous offset of the clown, though in the one 
case he parodies the leading motive of the drama, and 
represents the self-consciousness of the dramatist, while 
in the other he heightens the tragic effect by contrast, 
(as in the grave-digging scene of Hamlet,) and suggests 
that stolid but wholesome indifference of the general 
life — of what, for want of a better term, we call Nature 
■ — to the sin and suffering, the weakness and misfortunes 
of the individual man. All these nations had the same 
ancient examples before them, had the same reverence 
for antiquity, yet they involuntarily deviated, more or 
less happily, into originality, success, and the freedom 
of a living creativeness. The higher kinds of literature, 
the only kinds that live on because they had life at the 
start, are not, then, it should seem, the fabric of scholar- 
ship, of criticism, diligently studying and as diligently 
copying the best models, but are much rather born of 
some genetic principle in the character of the people and 
the age which produce them. One drop of ruddy human 



220 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

blood puts more life into the veins of a poem, than all 
the delusive aurum potabile that can be distilled out of 
the choicest library. 

The opera is the closest approach we have to the 
ancient drama in the essentials of structure and presen- 
tation ; and could we have a libretto founded on a 
national legend and written by one man of genius to be 
filled out and accompanied by the music of another, we 
might hope for something of the same effect upon the 
stage. But themes of universal familiarity and interest 
are rare, — Don Giovanni and Faust, perhaps, most 
nearly, though not entirely, fulfilling the required con- 
ditions, — and men of genius rarer. The oratorio seeks 
to evade the difficulty by choosing Scriptural subjects, 
and it may certainly be questioned whether the day of 
popular mythology, in the sense in which it subserves 
the purposes of epic or dramatic poetry, be not gone by 
forever. Longfellow is driven to take refuge among the 
red men, and Tennyson in the Cambro-Breton cyclus of 
Arthur; but it is impossible that such themes should 
come so intimately home to us as the semi-fabulous 
stories of their own ancestors did to the Greeks. The 
most successful attempt at reproducing the Greek trag- 
edy, both in theme and treatment, is the " Samson 
Agonistes," as it is also the most masterly piece of Eng- 
lish versification. Goethe admits that it alone, among 
modern works, has caught life from the breath of the 
antique spirit. But he failed to see, or at least to give, 
the reason of it ; probably failed to see it, or he would 
never have attempted the "Iphigenia." Milton not 
only subjected himself to the structural requirements 
of the Attic tragedy, but with a true poetic instinct 
availed himself of the striking advantage it had in the 
choice of a subject. No popular tradition lay near 
enough to him for his purpose ; none united in itself 



SWINBUBNE'S TRAGEDIES. 221 

the essential requisites of human interest and universal 
belief. He accordingly chose a Jewish mythus, very 
near to his own heart as a blind prisoner, betrayed by 
his wife, among the Philistines of the Restoration, and 
familiar to the earliest associations of his hearers. This 
subject, and this alone, met all the demands both of 
living poetic production and of antique form, — the 
action grandly simple, the personages few, the pro- 
tagonist at once a victim of divine judgment and an ex- 
ecutor of divine retribution, an intense personal sympa- 
thy in the poet himself, and no strangeness to the 
habitual prepossessions of those he addressed to be over- 
come before he could touch their hearts or be sure of 
aid from their imaginations. To compose such a drama 
on such a theme was to be Greek, and not to counterfeit 
it ; for Samson was to Milton traditionally just what 
Herakles was to Sophocles, and personally far more. 
The "Agonistes" is still fresh and strong as morning, 
but where are " Caractacus " and "Elfrida"? Nay, 
where is the far better work of a far abler man, — 
where is "Merope" 1 If the frame of mind which per- 
forms a deliberate experiment were the same as that 
which produces poetry vitalized through and through by 
the conspiring ardors of every nobler passion and power 
of the soul, then " Merope " might have had some little 
space of life. But without color, without harmonious 
rhythm of movement, with less passion than survived in 
an average Grecian ohost, and all this from the very 
theory of her creation, she has gone back, a shadow, to 
join her shadowy Italian and French namesakes in that 
limbo of things that would be and cannot be. Mr. 
Arnold but retraces, in his Preface to " Merope," the 
arguments of Mason in the letters prefixed to his classi- 
cal experiments. What finds defenders, but not readers, 
may be correct, classic, right in principle, but it is not 



222 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

poetry of that absolute kind which may and does help 
men, but needs no help of theirs ; and such surely we 
have a right to demand in tragedy, if nowhere else. We 
should not speak so unreservedly if we did not set a 
high value on Mr. Arnold and his poetic gift. But 
" Merope " has that one fault against which the very 
gods, we are told, strive in vain. It is dull, and the 
seed of this dulness lay in the system on which it was 
written. 

Pseudo-classicism takes two forms. Sometimes, as 
Mr. Landor has done, it attempts truth of detail to 
ancient scenery and manners, which may be attained 
either by hard reading and good memory, or at a cheaper 
rate from such authors as Becker. The " Moretum," 
once attributed to Virgil, and the idyl of Theocritus 
lately chosen as a text by Mr. Arnold, are interesting, 
because they describe real things ; but the mock-antique, 
if not true, is nothing, and how true such poems are 
likely to be we can judge by "Punch's" success at 
Yankeeisms, by all England's accurate appreciation of 
the manners and minds of a contemporary people one 
with herself in language, laws, religion, and literature. 
The eye is the only note-book of the true poet ; but a 
patchwork of second-hand memories is a laborious futil- 
ity, hard to write and harder to read, with about as much 
nature in it as a dialogue of the Deipnosophists. Alex- 
ander's bushel of peas was a criticism worthy of Aristotle's 
pupil. We should reward such writing with the gift of 
a classical dictionary. In this idyllic kind of poetry 
also we have a classic, because Goldsmith went to nature 
for his " Deserted Village," and borrowed of tradition 
nothing but the poetic diction in which he described it. 
This is the only method by which a poet may surely 
reckon on ever becoming an ancient himself. When we 
heard it said once that a certain poem might have been 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 223 

written by Simonides, we could not help thinking that, 
if it were so, then it was precisely what Simonides could 
never have written, since he looked at the world through 
his own eyes, not through those of Linus or Hesiod, and 
thought his own thoughts, not theirs, or we should never 
have had him to imitate. 

Objections of the same nature, but even stronger, lie 
against a servile copying of the form and style of the 
Greek tragic drama, and yet more against the selection 
of a Greek theme. As we said before, the life we lead, 
and the views we take of it, are more complex than 
those of men who lived five centuries before Christ. 
They may be better or worse, but, at any rate, they are 
different, and irremediably so. The idea and the form 
in which it naturally embodies itself, mutually sustain- 
ing and invigorating each other, cannot be divided with- 
out endangering the lives of both. For in all real 
poetry the form is not a garment, but a body. Our 
very passion has become metaphysical, and speculates 
upon itself. Their simple and downright way of think- 
ing loses all its savor when we assume it to ourselves 
by an effort of thought. Human nature, it is true, re- 
mains always the same, but the displays of it change ; 
the habits which are a second nature modify it inwardly 
as well as outwardly, and what moves it to passionate 
action in one age may leave it indifferent in the next. 
Between us and the Greeks lies the grave of their 
murdered paganism, making our minds and theirs irrec- 
oncilable. Christianity as steadily intensifies the self- 
consciousness of man as the religion of the Greeks must 
have turned their thoughts away from themselves to tho 
events of this life and the phenomena of nature. We 
cannot even conceive of their conception of Phoibos 
with any plausible assurance of coming near the truth. 
To take lesser matters, since the invention of printing 



224 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

and the cheapening of books have made the thought of 
all ages and nations the common property of educated 
men, we cannot so dis-saturate our minds of it as to be 
keenly thrilled in the modern imitation with those com- 
monplaces of proverbial lore in which the chorus and 
secondary characters are apt to indulge, though in the 
original they may interest us as being natural and 
characteristic. In the German-silver of the modern we 
get something of this kind, which does not please us the 
more by being cut up into single lines that recall the 
outward semblance of some pages in Sophocles. We 
find it cheaper to make a specimen than to borrow one. 

Chorus. Foolish who bites off nose, his face to spite. 
Outis. Who fears his fate, him Fate shall one day spurn. 
Chorus. The gods themselves are pliable to Fate. 
Outis. The strong self-ruler dreads no other sway. 
Chorus. Sometimes the shortest way goes most about. 
Outis. Why fetch a compass, having stars within? 
Chorus. A shepherd once, I know that stars may set. 
Outis. That thou led'st sheep fits not for leading men. 
Chorus. To sleep-sealed eyes the wolf-dog barks in vain. 

We protest that we have read something very like this, 
we will not say where, and we might call it the battle- 
door and shuttlecock style of dialogue, except that the 
players do not seem to have any manifest relation to 
each other, but each is intent on keeping his own bit 
of feathered cork continually in the air. 

The first sincerely popular yearning toward antiquity, 
the first germ of Schiller's " Gotter Griechenland's " is 
to be found in the old poem of Tanh'auser, very near- 
ly coincident with the beginnings of the Reformation. 
And if we might allegorize it, we should say that it 
typified precisely that longing after Venus, under her 
other name of Charis, which represents the relation in 
which modern should stand to ancient art. It is the 
grace of the Greeks, their sense of proportion, their dis- 



SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 225 

taste for the exaggerated, their exquisite propriety of 
phrase, which steadies imagination without cramping it, 
■ — it is these that we should endeavor to assimilate 
without the loss of our own individuality. We should 
quicken our sense of form by intelligent sympathy with 
theirs, and not stiffen it into formalism by a servile sur- 
render of what is genuine in us to what was genuine 
in them. "A pure form," says Schiller, "helps and 
sustains, an impure one hinders and shatters." But we 
should remember that the spirit of the age must enter 
as a modifying principle, not only into ideas, but into 
the best manner of their expression. The old bottles 
will not always serve for the new wine. A principle of 
life is the first requirement of all art, and it can only be 
communicated by the touch of the time and a simple 
faith in it ; all else is circumstantial and secondaiy. 
The Greek tragedy passed through the three natural 
stages of poetry, — the imaginative in iEschylus, the 
thoughtfully artistic in Sophocles, the sentimental in 
Euripides, — and then died. If people could only learn 
the general applicability to periods and schools of what 
young Mozart says of Gellert, that " he had written no 
poetry since his death " ! No effort to raise a defunct 
past has ever led to anything but just enough galvanic 
twitching of the limbs to remind us unpleasantly of life. 
The romantic movement of the school of German poets 
which succeeded Goethe and Schiller ended in extrava- 
gant unreality, and Goethe himself with his enerring 
common-sense, has given us, in the second part of Faust, 
the result of his own and Schiller's common striving 
after a Grecian ideal. Euphorion, the child of Faust 
and Helen, falls dead at their feet ; and Helen herself 
soon follows him to the shades, leaving only her mantle 
in the hands of her lover. This, he is told, shall lift 
him above the earth. We fancy we can interpret the 
10* o 



226 SWINBURNE'S TRAGEDIES. 

symbol. Whether we can or not, it is certainly sugges- 
tive of thought that the only immortal production of 
the greatest of recent poets was conceived and carried 
out in that Gothic spirit and form from which he was all 
his life struggling to break loose. 



CHAUCER.* 



WILL it do to say anything more about Chaucer % 
Can any on'e hope to say anything, not new, but 
even fresh, on a topic so well worn 1 It may well be 
doubted ; and yet one is always the better for a walk in 
the morning air, — a medicine which may be taken over 
and over again without any sense of sameness, or any 
failure of its invigorating quality. There is a pervading 
wholesomeness in the writings of this man, — a vernal 
property that soothes and refreshes in a way of which no 
other has ever found the secret. I repeat to myself a 
thousand times, — 

" Whan that Aprile with his showres sote 
The di*oughte of March hath perced to the rote, 
And bathed every veine in swich licour 
Of which vertue engendered is the flour, — * 
When Zephyrus eek with his swete breth 
Enspired hath in every holt and heth 
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne 
Hath in the ram his halfe cors yronne, 
And smale foules maken melodie," — 

and still at the thousandth time a breath of uncontami- 

* Publications of the Chaucer Society. London. 1869-70. 

Etude sur G. Chaucer considere comme imitateur des Trouveres. Par 
E. G. Sandras, Agrege 1 de l'Universite. Paris: Auguste Dusand. 
1859. 8vo. pp. 298. 

Geoffrey Chaucer' 1 s Canterbury- Geschichten, uebersetzt in den Vers- 
massen der Urschrift, und durch Einleitung und AnmerTiungen erlautert. 
Von Wilhei/m Hertzberg. Hildburghausen. 1866. 12mo. pp.674. 

Chaucer in Seinen Beziehungen zur Ualienischen Literatur. Inaugu- 
ral-Dissertation zur Erlangung der Doctorwiirde. Von Alfons Kiss- 
ner. Bonn. 1867. 8vo pp. 81. 



228 CHAUCER. 

nate springtide seems to lift the hair upon my forehead. 
If here be not the largior ether, the serene and motionless 
atmosphere of classical antiquity, we find at least the 
seclusum nemus, the domos placidas, and the oubliance, 
as Froissart so sweetly calls it, that persuade us we are 
in an Elysium none the less sweet that it appeals to our 
more purely human, one might almost say domestic, sym- 
pathies. We may say of Chaucer's muse, as Overbury of 
his milkmaid, " her breath is her own, which scents all 
the year long of June like a new-made haycock." The 
most hardened roue of literature can scarce confront these 
simple and winning graces without feeling somewhat of 
the unworn sentiment of his youth revive in him. Mod- 
ern imaginative literature has become so self-conscious, 
and therefore so melancholy, that Art, which should be 
" the world's sweet inn," whither Ave repair for refresh- 
ment and repose, has become rather a watering-place, 
where one's own private touch of the liver-complaint is 
exasperated by the affluence of other sufferers whose talk 
is a narrative of morbid symptoms. Poets have forgot- 
ten that the first lesson of literature, no less than of life, 
is the learning how to burn your own smoke ; that the 
way to be original is to be healthy ; that the fresh color, 
so delightful in all good writing, is won by escaping from 
the fixed air of self into the brisk atmosphere of universal 
sentiments ; and that to make the common marvellous, 
as if it were a revelation, is the test of genius. It is good 
to retreat now and then beyond earshot of the introspec- 
tive confidences of modern literature, and to lose our- 
selves in the gracious worldliness of Chaucer. Here was 
a healthy and hearty man, so genuine that he need not 
ask whether he were genuine or no, so sincere as quite to 
forget his own sincerity, so truly pious that he could be 
happy in the best world that God chose to make, so hu- 
mane that he loved even the foibles of his kind. Here 



CHAUCER. 229 

was a truly epic poet, without knowing it, who did not 
waste time in considering whether his age were good or 
bad, but quietly taking it for granted as the best that 
ever was or could be for him, has left us such a picture 
of contemporary life as no man ever painted. "A per- 
petual fountain of good-sense," Dryden calls him, yes, 
and of good-humor, too, and wholesome thought. He 
was one of those rare authors whom, if we had met him 
under a porch in a shower, we should have preferred to 
the rain. He could be happy with a crust and spring- 
water, and could see the shadow of his benign face in a 
flagon of Gascon wine without fancying Death sitting 
opposite to cry Supernaculum ! when he had drained it. 
He could look to God without abjectness, and, on man 
without contempt. The pupil of manifold experience, 
— scholar, courtier, soldier, ambassador, who had known 
poverty as a housemate and been the companion of 
princes, — his was one of those hapjyy temperaments 
that could equally enjoy both halves of culture, — the 
world of books and the world of men. 

" Unto this day it doth mine herte boote, 
That I have had my world as in my time ! " 

The portrait of Chaucer, which we owe to the loving 
regret of his disciple Occleve, confirms the judgment of 
him which we make from his works. It is, I think, more 
engaging than that of any other poet. The downcast 
eyes, half sly, half meditative, the sensuous mouth, the 
broad brow, drooping with weight of thought, and yet 
with an inexpugnable youth shining out of it as from the 
morning forehead of a boy, are all noticeable, and not less 
so their harmony of placid tenderness. We are struck, 
too, with the smoothness of the nice as of one who thought 
easily, whose phrase flowed naturally, and who had never 
puckered his brow over an unmanageable verse. 

Nothing has been added to our knowledge of Chaucer's 



230 CHAUCER. 

life since Sir Harris Nicholas, with the help of original 
records, weeded away the fictions by which the few facts 
were choked and overshadowed. We might be sorry that 
no confirmation has been found for the story, fathered 
on a certain phantasmal Mr. Buckley, that Chaucer was 
u fined two shillings for beating a Franciscan friar in 
J^eet Street/' if it were only for the alliteration; but we 
refuse to give up the meeting with Petrarch. All the 
probabilities are in its favor. That Chaucer, being at 
Milan, should not have found occasion to ride across so 
far as Padua, for the sake of seeing the most famous lit- 
erary man of the day, is incredible. If Froissart could 
journey on horseback through Scotland and Wales, surely 
Chaucer, t whose curiosity was as lively as his, might have 
ventured what would have been a mere pleasure-trip in 
comparison. I cannot easily bring myself to believe that 
he is not giving some touches of his own character in 
that of the Clerk of Oxford : — 

" For him was liefer have at his bed's head 
A twenty bookes clothed in black and red 
Of Aristotle and his philosophic 
Than robes rich, or fiddle or psaltrie : 
But although that he were a philosopher 
Yet had he but a little gold in coffer: 
Of study took he moste care and heed; 
Not one word spake he more than was need : 
All that he spake it was of high prudence, 
And short and quick, and full of great sentence;. 
Sounding in moral virtue was his speech 
And gladly would he learn and gladly teach." 

That, himself as plump as Horace, he should have 
described the Clerk as being lean, will be no objection to 
those who remember how carefully Chaucer effaces his 
own personality in his great poem. Our chief debt to 
Sir Harris Nicholas is for having disproved the story that 
Chaucer, imprisoned for complicity in the insurrection of 
John of Northampton, had set himself free by betraying 



CHAUCER. 231 

his accomplices. That a poet, one of whose leading 

qualities is his good sense and moderation, and who 

should seem to have practised his own rule, to 

" Fly from the press and dwell with soothfastness ; 
Suffice thee thy good though it be small," 

should have been concerned in any such political excesses, 

was improbable enough ; but that he should add to this 

the baseness of broken faith was incredible except to 

such as in a doubtful story 

" Demen gladly to the badder end." 

Sir Harris Nicholas has proved by the records that the 

fabric is baseless, and we may now read the poet's fine 

verse, 

" Truth is the highest thing a man may keep," 

without a pang. We are thankful that Chaucer's shoul- 
ders are finally discharged of that weary load, " The 
Testament of Love." * The later biographers seem in- 
clined to make Chaucer a younger man at his death in 
1400 than has hitherto been supposed. Herr Hertzberg 
even puts his birth so late as 1310. But, till more con- 
clusive evidence is produced, w T e shall adhere to the re- 
ceived dates as on the whole more consonant with the 
probabilities of the case. The monument is clearly right 
as to the year of his death, and the chances are at least 
even tha,t both this and the date of birth were copied 
from an older inscription. The only counter-argument 
that has much force is the manifestly unfinished condi- 
tion of the " Canterbury Tales." That a man of seventy 
odd could have put such a spirit of youth into those 

* Tyrwhitt doubted the authenticity of " The Flower and the Leaf" 
and " The Cuckoo and the Nightingale." To these Mr. Bradshaw 
(and there can be no higher authority) would add " The Court of Love," 
the "Dream," the " Praise of Woman," the " Romaunt of the Rose," 
and several of the shorter poems. To these doubtful productions there 
is strong ground, both moral and aesthetic, for adding the " Parson's 
Tale." 



232 CHAUCER. 

matchless prologues will not, however, surprise those who 
remember Dryden's second spring-time. It is plain that 
the notion of giving unity to a number of disconnected 
stories by the device which Chaucer adopted was an after- 
thought. These stories had been written, and some of 
them even published, at periods far asunder, and without 
any reference to connection among themselves. The pro- 
logues, and those parts which internal evidence justifies 
us in taking them to have been written after the thread 
of plan to string them on was conceived, are in every way 
more mature, — in knowledge of the world, in easy mas- 
tery of verse and language, and in the overpoise of senti- 
ment by judgment. They may with as much probability 
be referred to a green old age as to the middle-life of a 
man who, upon any theory of the dates, was certainly 
slow in ripening. 

The formation of a Chaucer Society, now four cen- 
turies and a half after the poet's death, gives suitable 
occasion for taking a new observation of him, as of a 
fixed star, not only in our own, but in the European 
literary heavens, " whose worth 's unknown although his 
height be taken." The admirable work now doing by 
this Society, whose establishment was mainly due to the 
pious zeal of Mr. Furnivall, deserves recognition from 
all who know how to value the too rare union of accu- 
rate scholarship with minute exactness in reproducing 
the text. The six-text edition of the "Canterbury Tales," 
giving what is practically equivalent to six manuscript 
copies, is particularly deserving of gratitude from this 
side the water, as it for the first time affords to Ameri- 
cans the opportunity of independent critical study and 
comparison. This beautiful work is fittingly inscribed 
to our countryman, Professor Child, of Harvard, a lover 
of Chaucer, "so proved by his wordes and his werke," 



CHAUCER. 233 

who has done more for the great poet's memory than 
any man since Tyrwhitt. We earnestly hope that the 
Society may find enough support to print all the re- 
maining manuscript texts of importance, for there can 
hardly be any one of them that may not help us to a 
valuable hint. The works of Mr. Sandras and Herr 
Hertzberg show that this is a matter of interest not 
merely or even primarily to English scholars. The in- 
troduction to the latter is one of the best essays on 
Chaucer yet written, while the former, which is an in- 
vestigation of the French and Italian sources of the 
poet, supplies us with much that is new and worth 
having as respects the training of the poet, and the 
obstacles of fashion and taste through which he had to 
force his way before he could find free play for his native 
genius or even so much as arrive at a consciousness 
thereof. M. Sandras is in every way a worthy pupil of 
the accomplished M. Victor Leclerc, and, though he lays 
perhaps a little too much stress on the indebtedness of 
Chaucer in particulars, shows a singularly intelligent 
and clear-sighted eye for the general grounds of his 
claim to greatness and originality. It is these grounds 
which I propose chiefly to examine here. 

The first question we put to any poet, nay, to any 
so-called national literature, is that which Farinata 
addressed to Dante, Chi fur li maggior tui ? Here is no 
question of plagiarism, for poems are not made of words 
and thoughts and images, but of that something in the 
poet himself which can compel them to obey him and 
move to the rhythm of his nature. Thus it is that the 
new poet, however late he come, can never be forestalled, 
and the ship-builder who built the pinnace of Columbus 
has as much claim to the discovery of America as he 
who suggests a thought by which some other man opens 
new worlds to us has to a share in that achievement by 



234 CHAUCER. 

him unconceived and inconceivable. Chaucer undoubt- 
edly began as an imitator, perhaps as mere translator, 
serving the needful apprenticeship in the use of his 
tools. Children learn to speak by watching the lips and 
catching the words of those who know how already, and 
poets learn in the same way from their elders. They 
import their raw material from any and everywhere, and 
the question at last comes down to this, — whether an 
author have original force enough to assimilate all he 
has acquired, or that be so overmastering as to assimi- 
late him. If the poet turn out the stronger, we allow 
hi in to help himself from other people with wonderful 
equanimity. Should a man discover the art of trans- 
muting metals and present us with a lump of gold as 
large as an ostrich-egg, would it be in human nature to 
inquire too nicely whether he had stolen the lead % 

Nothing is more certain than that great poets are not 
sudden prodigies, but slow results. As an oak profits 
by the foregone lives of immemorial vegetable races 
that have worked-over the juices of earth and air into 
organic life out of whose dissolution a soil might gather 
fit to maintain that nobler birth of nature, so we may 
be sure that the genius of every remembered poet drew 
the forces that built it up out of the decay of a long 
succession of forgotten ones. Nay, in proportion as the 
genius is vigorous and original will its indebtedness be 
greater, will its roots strike deeper into the past and 
grope in remoter fields for the virtue that must sustain 
it. Indeed, if the works of the great poets teach any- 
thing, it is to hold mere invention somewhat cheap. It 
is not the finding of a thing, but the making something 
out of it after it is found, that is of consequence. Ac- 
cordingly, Chaucer, like Shakespeare, invented almost 
nothing. Wherever he found anything directed to 
Geoffrey Chaucer, he took it and made the most of it. 



CHAUCEE. 235 

It was not the subject treated, but himself, that wak 
the new thing. Cela rrCappartient de droit, Moliere is 
reported to have said when accused of plagiarism. 
Chaucer pays that "usurious interest which gen. 
Coleridge says, "always pays in borrowing." The char- 
acteristic touch is his own. In the famous pass; 
about the caged bird, copied from the " Romaunt of the 
Rose," the "gon eten wormes" was added by him. A 
must let him, if he will, eat the heart out of the litera 
ture that had preceded him, as we sacrifice the mulberry- 
leaves to the silkworm, because he knows how to convert 
them into something richer and more lasting. The 
question of originality is not one of form, but of sub- 
stance, not of cleverness, but of imaginative power. 
Given your material, in other words the life in which 
you live, how much can you see in it 1 ? For on that 
depends how much you can make of it. Is it merely 
an arrangement of man's contrivance, a patchwork of 
expediencies for temporary comfort and convenience, 
good enough if it last your time, or is it so much of the 
surface of that ever-flowing deity which we call Time, 
wherein we catch such fleeting reflection as is possible 
for us, of our relation to perdurable things % This is 
what makes the difference between iEschylus and Eurip- 
ides, between Shakespeare and Fletcher, between Goethe 
and Heine, between literature and rhetoric. Some- 
thing of this depth of insight, if not in the fullest, yet 
in no inconsiderable measure, characterizes Chaucer. 
We must not let his playfulness, his delight in the world 
as mere spectacle, mislead us into thinking that he was 
incapable of serious purpose or insensible to the deeper 
meanings of life. 

There are four principal sources from which Chaucer 
may be presumed to have drawn for poetical suggestion 
or literary culture, — the Latins, the Troubadours, the 



236 . CHAUCER. 

Trouveres, and the Italians. It is only the two latter 
who can fairly claim any immediate influence in the 
direction of his thought or the formation of his style. 
The only Latin poet who can be supposed to have in- 
fluenced the spirit of mediieval literature is Ovid. In 
his sentimentality, his love of the marvellous and the 
picturesque, he is its natural precursor. The analogy 
between his Fasti and the versified legends of saints is 
more than a fanciful one. He was certainly popular 
with the poets of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
turies. Virgil had wellnigh become mythical. The 
chief merit of the ProveiiQal poets is in having been the 
first to demonstrate that it was possible to write Avith 
elegance in a modern dialect, and their interest for us is 
mainly as forerunners, as indications of tendency. Their 
literature is prophecy, not fulfilment. Its formal senti- 
ment culminated in Laura, its ideal aspiration in Bea- 
trice. Shakespeare's hundred and sixth sonnet, if, for the 
imaginary mistress to whom it was addressed, we substi- 
tute the muse of a truer conception and more perfected 
utterance, represents exactly the feeling with which we 
read Provencal poetry : — 

" When in the chronicle of wasted Time 
I see descriptions of the fairest wights 
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme 
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, 

I see their antique pen would have expressed 

Even such a beauty as you master now; 

So all their praises are but prophecies 

Of this our time, all you prefiguring, 

And, for they looked but with divining eyes, 

They had not skill enough your worth to sing." 

It is astonishing how little of the real life of the time we 
learn from the Troubadours except by way of inference 
and deduction. Their poetry is purely lyric in its most 
narrow sense, that is, the expression of personal and 



CHAUCER. 237 

momentary moods. To the fancy of critics who take 
their cue from tradition, Provence is a morning sky of 
early summer, out of which innumerable larks rain a 
faint melody (the sweeter because rather half divined 
than heard too distinctly) over an earth where the dew 
never dries and the flowers never fade. But when we 
open Raynouard it is like opening the door of an aviary. 
We are deafened and confused by a hundred minstrels 
singing the same song at once, and more than suspect 
that the flowers they welcome are made of French cam- 
bric spangled with dewdrops of prevaricating glass. 
Bernard de Ventadour and Bertrand de Born are well- 
nigh the only ones among them in whom we find an 
original type. Yet the Troubadours undoubtedly led 
the way to refinement of conception and perfection of 
form. They were the conduit through which the failing 
stream of Roman literary tradition flowed into the new 
channel which mediaeval culture was slowly shaping for 
itself. Without them we could not understand Petrarca, 
who carried the manufacture of artificial bloom and fic- 
titious dew-drop to a point of excellence where artifice, 
if ever, may claim the praise of art. Without them we 
could not understand Dante, in whom their sentiment 
for woman was idealized by a passionate intellect and 
a profound nature, till Beatrice becomes a half-human, 
half-divine abstraction, a woman still to memory and 
devotion, a disembodied symbol to the ecstasy of thought. 
The Provencal love-poetry was as abstracted from all 
sensuality as that of Petrarca, but it stops short of that 
larger and more gracious style of treatment which has 
secured him a place in all gentle hearts and refined 
imaginations forever. In it also woman leads her ser- 
vants upward, but it is along the easy slopes of conven- 
tional sentiment, and no Troubadour so much as dreamed 
oi that loftier region, native to Dante, where the woman 



238 CHAUCEE. 

is subtilized into das Eivig-Weibliche, type of man's finer 
conscience and nobler aspiration made sensible to him 
only through her. 

On the whole, it would be hard to find anything more 
tediously artificial than the Provencal literature, except 
the reproduction of it by the Minnesingers. The Tedes- 
chi lurchi certainly did contrive to make something heavy 
as dough out of what was at least light, if not very satis- 
fying, in the canorous dialect of Southern Gaul. But its 
doom was inevitably predicted in its nature and position, 
nay, in its very name. It was, and it continues to be, a 
strictly provincial literature, imprisoned within extreme- 
ly narrow intellectual and even geographical limits. It 
is not race or language that can inflict this leprous isola- 
tion, but some defect of sympathy with the simpler and 
more universal relations of human nature. You cannot 
shut up Burns in a dialect bristling with archaisms, nor 
prevent Beranger from setting all pulses a-dance in the 
least rhythmic and imaginative of modern tongues. The 
healthy temperament of Chaucer, with its breadth of inter- 
est in all ranks and phases of social life, could have found 
little that was sympathetic in the evaporated sentiment 
and rhetorical punctilios of a school of poets which, with 
rare exceptions, began and ended in courtly dilettantism. 

The refined formality with which the literary product 
of Provence is for the most part stamped, as with a 
trademark, was doubtless the legacy of Gallo-Roman cul- 
ture, itself at best derivative and superficial. I think, 
indeed, that it may well be doubted whether Roman 
literature, always a half-hardy exotic, could ripen the 
seeds of living reproduction. The Roman genius was 
eminently practical, and far more apt for the triumphs 
of politics and jurisprudence than of art. Supreme ele- 
gance it could and did arrive at in Virgil, but, if I may 
trust my own judgment, it produced but one original 



CHAUCER. 239 

poet, and that was Horace, who has ever since continued 
the favorite of men of the world, an apostle to the Gen- 
tiles of the mild cynicism of middle-age and an after- 
dinner philosophy. Though in no sense national, he was, 
more truly than any has ever been since, till the same 
combination of circumstances produced Beranger, an ur- 
bane or city poet. Rome, with her motley life, her formal 
religion, her easy morals, her spectacles, her luxury, her 
suburban country-life, was his muse. The situation was 
new, and found a singer who had wit enough to turn it 
to account. There are a half-dozen pieces of Catullus 
unsurpassed (unless their Greek originals should turn 
up) for lyric grace and fanciful tenderness. The sparrow 
of Lesbia still pecks the rosy lips of his mistress, im- 
mortal as the eagle of Pindar. One profound imagination, 
one man, who with a more prosperous subject might 
have been a great poet, lifted Roman literature above 
its ordinary level of tasteful common-sense. The in- 
vocation of Venus, as the genetic force of nature, by 
Lucretius, seems to me the one sunburst of purely poetic 
inspiration which the Latin language can show. But 
this very force, without which neque fit latum neque 
amabile quicquam was wholly wanting in those poets of 
the post-classic period, through whom the literary in- 
fluences of the past were transmitted to the romanized 
provincials. The works of Ausonius interest us as those 
of our own Dwights and Barlows do. The " Conquest of 
Canaan " and the " Columbiad " were Connecticut epics 
no doubt, but still were better than nothing in theit 
day. If not literature, they were at least memories of 
literature, and such memories are not without effect in 
reproducing what they regret. The provincial writers 
of Latin devoted themselves with a dreary assiduity to 
the imitation of models which they deemed classical, 
but which were truly so only in the se lit they 



240 CHAUCER. 

were the more decorously respectful of the dead form in 
proportion as the living spirit had more utterly gone out 
of it. It is, I suspect, to the traditions of this purely 
rhetorical influence, indirectly exercised, that we are to 
attribute the rapid passage of the new Provengal poetry 
from what must have been its original popular character 
to that highly artificial condition which precedes total 
extinction. It was the alienation of the written from 
the spoken language (always, perhaps, more or less ma- 
lignly operative in giving Roman literature a cold-blooded 
turn as compared with Greek), which, ending at length 
in total divorce, rendered Latin incapable of supplying 
the wants of new men and new ideas. The same thing, 
I am strongly inclined to think, was true of the language 
of the Troubadours. It had become literary, and so far 
dead. It is true that no language is ever so far gone in 
consumption as to be beyond the great-poet-cure. Un- 
doubtedly a man of genius can out of his own super- 
abundant vitality compel life into the most decrepit 
vocabulary. But it is by the infusion of his own blood, 
as it were, and not without a certain sacrifice of power. 
No such rescue came for the langue d'oc, which, it should 
seem, had performed its special function in the devel- 
opment of modern literature, and would have perished 
even without the Albigensian war. The position of the 
Gallo-Romans of the South, both ethical and geographi- 
cal, precluded them from producing anything really great 
or even original in literature, for that must have its root 
in a national life, and this they never had. After the 
Burgundian invasion their situation was in many respects 
analogous to our own after the Revolutionary War. They 
had been thoroughly romanized in language and culture, 
but the line of their historic continuity had been broken. 
The Roman road, which linked them with the only past 
they knew, had been buried under the great barbarian 



CHAUCER. 241 

land-slide. In like manner we, inheriting the language, 
the social usages, the literary and political traditions of 
Englishmen, were suddenly cut adrift from our historical 
anchorage. Very soon there arose a demand for a native 
literature, nay, it was even proposed that, as a first step 
toward it, we should adopt a lingo of our own to be called 
the Columbian or Hesperian. This, to be sure, was never 
accomplished, though our English cousins seem to hint 
sometimes that we have made very fair advances toward 
it ; but if it could have been, our position would have 
been precisely that of the Provencals when they began to 
have a literature of their own. They had formed a lan- 
guage which, while it completed their orphanage from 
their imperial mother, continually recalled her, and kept 
alive their pride of lineage. Such reminiscences as they 
still retained of Latin culture were pedantic and rhetor- 
ical,* and it was only natural that out of these they 
should have elaborated a code of poetical jurisprudence 
with titles and subtitles applicable to every form of verse 
and tyrannous over every mode of sentiment. The re- 
sult could not fail to be artificial and wearisome, except 
where some man with a truly lyrical genius could breathe 
life into the rigid formula and make it pliant to his more 
passionate feeling. The great service of the Provencals 
was that they kept in mind the fact that poetry was not 
merely an amusement, but an art, and long after their 
literary activity had ceased their influence reacted bene- 
ficially upon Europe through their Italian pupils. They 
are interesting as showing the tendency of the Romanic 
races to a scientific treatment of what, if it be not 
spontaneous, becomes a fashion and erelong an imperti- 
nence. Fauriel has endeavored to prove that they were 
the first to treat the mediaeval heroic legends epically, 
but the evidence is strongly against him. The testimony 

* Fauriel, Ffistoire de la Gaule Meridionale, Vol. I. passim. 
11 r 



242 CHAUCER. 

of Dante on this point is explicit,* and moreover not a 
single romance of chivalry has come down to ns in a 
dialect of the pure Provencal. 

The Trouveres, oh the other hand, are apt to have 
something naive and vigorous about them, something 
that smacks of race and soil. Their very coarseness 
is almost better than the Troubadour delicacy, because 
it was not an affectation. The difference between the 
two schools is that between a culture pedantically trans- 
mitted and one which grows and gathers strength from 
natural causes. Indeed, it is to the North of France and 
to the Trouveres that we are to look for the true origins 
of our modern literature. I do not mean in their epi- 
cal poetry, though there is something refreshing in the 
mere fact of their choosing native heroes and legends as 
the subjects of their song. It was in their Fabliaux and 
Lais that, dealing with the realities of the life about 
them, they became original and delightful in spite of 
themselves. Their Chansons de Geste are fine specimens 
of fighting Christianity, highly iu spiring for men like 
Peire de Bergerac, who sings 

" Bel m'es can aug lo resso 
Que fai l'ausbercs ab l'arso, 
Li brnit e il crit e il masan 
Que il corn e las trombas fan " ; 

but who after reading them — even the best of them, 

* Allegat ergo pro se lingua Oil quod propter eui faciliorem et delec- 
tabiliorem vulgaritatem, quicquid redactum sive inventum est ad vul- 
gare prosaicmn, suum est; videlicet biblia cum Trojanorum, Roman- 
orumque gestibus compilata et Arturi regis ambages pulcherrimae et 
quamplures alioe historiae ac doctrinse. That Dante by prosaicum did 
not mean prose, but a more inartificial verse, numeros lege solutos, is 
clear. Of. Wolf, Ueber die Lais, pp. 92 seq. and notes. It has not, I 
think, been remarked that Dante borrows his faciliorem et delectabilio- 
rtm from the plus d'detable et comune of his master Brunetto Latini. 
f " My ears no sweeter music know 

Than hauberk's clank with saddlebow, 
The noise, the cries, the tumult blown 
From trumpet and from clarion." 



4Q 



CHAUCER. 2±o 

the Song of Roland — can remember much more than a 
cloud of battle-dust, through which the paladins loom 
dimly gigantic, and a strong verse flashes here and there 
like an angry sword ] What are the Roman d 'avantures, 
the cycle of Arthur and his knights, but a procession of 
armor and plumes, mere spectacle, not vision like their 
Grecian antitype, the Odyssey, whose pictures of life, 
whether domestic or heroic, are among the abiding con- 
solations of the mind ? An element of disproportion, of 
grotesqueness.* earmark of the barbarian, disturbs us, 
even when it does not disgust, in them all. Except the 
Roland, they all want adequate motive, and even in that 
we may well suspect a reminiscence of the Iliad. They 
are not without a kind of dignity, for manliness is always 
noble, and there are detached scenes that are striking, 
perhaps all the more so from their rarity, like the com- 
bat of Oliver and Fierabras, and the leave-taking of 
Parise la Duchesse. But in point of art they are far 
below even Firdusi, whose great poem is of precisely the 
same romantic type. The episode of Sohrab and Rustem 
as much surpasses the former of the passages just alluded 
to in largeness and energy of treatment, in the true 
epical quality, as the lament of Tehmine over her son 
does the latter of them in refined and natural pathos. 
In our revolt against pseudo-classicism we must not let 
our admiration for the vigor and freshness which are the 
merit of this old poetry tempt us to forget that our 
direct literary inheritance comes to us from an ancestry 
who would never have got beyond the Age of Iron but 
for the models of graceful form and delicate workman- 
ship which they found in the tombs of an earlier race. 

I recall but one passage (from Jourdain de Blaivies) 
which in its simple movement of the heart can in any 
way be compared with Chaucer. I translate it freely, 

* Compare Floripar in Fierabras with Nausikaa, for example. ! 



244 CHAUCER. 

merely changing the original assonance into rhyme. 
Eremborc, to save the son of her liege-lord, has passed- 
off her own child for his, only stipulating that he shall 
pass the night before his death with her in the prison 
where she is confined by the usurper Fromond. The 
time is just as the dreaded dawn begins to break. 

" ' Gamier, fair son,' the noble lady said, 
'To save thy father's life must thou be dead; 
And mine, alas, must be with sorrow spent, 
Since thou must die, albeit so innocent ! 
Evening thou shalt not see that see'st the morn! 
Woe worth the hour that I beheld thee born, 
Whom nine long months within my side I bore ! 
Was never babe desired so much before. 
Now summer will the pleasant days recall 
When I shall take my stand upon the wall 
And see the fair young gentlemen thy peers 
That come and go, and, as beseems their years 
Run at the quintain, strive to pierce the shield, 
And in the tourney keep their sell or yield; 
Then must my heart be tearswoln for thy sake 
That 't will be marvel if it do not break.' 
At morning, when the day began to peer, 
Matins rang out from minsters far and near, 
And the clerks sang full well with voices high. 
4 God,' said the dame, ' thou glorious in the sky, 
These lingering nights were wont to tire me so ! 
And this, alas, how swift it hastes to go ! 
These clerks and cloistered folk, alas, in spite 
So early sing to cheat me of my night! ' " 

The great advantages which the langue dJoil had over 
its sister dialect of the South of France were its wider 
distribution, and its representing the national and unitary 
tendencies of the people as opposed to those of provin- 
cial isolation. But the Trouveres had also this superi- 
ority, that they gave a voice to real and not merely 
conventional emotions. In comparison with the Trou- 
badours their sympathies were more human, and their 
expression more popular. While the tiresome ingenuity 
of the latter busied itself chiefly in the filigree of wire- 



CHAUCER. 245 

drawn sentiment and supersubtilized conceit, the former 
took their subjects from the street and the market as 
well as from the chateau. In the one case language had 
become a mere material for clever elaboration ; in the 
other, as always in live literature, it was a soil from 
which the roots of thought and feeling unconsciously 
drew the coloring of vivid expression. The writers of 
French, by the greater pliancy of their dialect and the 
simpler forme of their verse, had acquired an ease which 
was impossible in the more stately and sharply angled 
vocabulary of the South. Their octosyllabics have not 
seldom a careless facility not unworthy of Sw : "c in his 
best mood. They had attained the highest skill and 
grace in narrative, as the lays of Marie ue France and 
the Lai de VOiselet bear witness.* Above all, they had 
learned how to brighten the hitherto monotonous web of 
story with the gayer hues of fancy. 

It is no improbable surmise that the sudden and sur- 
prising development of the more strictly epical poetiy in 
the North of France, and especially its growing partiality 
for historical in preference to mythical subjects, were 
due to the Normans. The poetry of the Danes was much 
of it authentic history, or what was believed to be so ; 
the heroes of their Sagas were real men, with wives and 
children, with relations public and domestic, on the 
common levels of life, and not mere creatures of imagina- 
tion, who dwell apart like stars from the vulgar cares and 
interests of men. If we compare Havelok with the least 
idealized figures of Carlo vingian or Arthurian romance, 
we shall have a keen sense of this difference. Manhood 
has taken the place of caste, and homeliness of exaggera- 
tion. Havelok says, — 

" Godwot, I will with thee gang 
For to learn some good to get ; 

* If internal evidence may be trusted, the Led de VEspine is not hers. 



246 CHAUCER. 

Swinken would I for my meat ; 
It is no shame for to swinken." 

This Dane, we see, is of our own make and stature, a 
being much nearer our kindly sympathies than his com- 
patriot Ogier, of whom w T e are told, 

" Dix pies de lone avoit le chevalier." 

But however large or small share we may allow to the 
Danes in changing the character of French poetry and 
supplanting the Romance with the Fabliau, there can be 
littlo doubt either of the kind or amount of influence 
which ti ? Normans must have brought with them into 
England. I am n °t going to attempt a definition of the 
Anglo-Saxon efement in English literature, for generaliza- 
tions are apt to be as dangerous as they are tempting. 
But as a painter may draw a cloud so that we recognize 
its general truth, though the boundaries of real clouds 
never remain the same for two minutes together, so amid 
the changes of feature and complexion brought about 
by commingling of race, there still remains a certain 
cast of physiognomy which points back to some one 
ancestor of marked and peculiar character. It is toward 
this type that there is always a tendency to revert, to 
borrow Mr. Darwin's phrase, and I think the general 
belief is not without some adequate grounds which 
in France traces this predominant type to the Kelt, and 
in England to the Saxon. In old and stationary com- 
munities, where tradition has a chance to take root, and 
where several generations are present to the mind of each 
inhabitant, either by personal recollection or transmitted 
anecdote, everybody's peculiarities, whether of strength 
or weakness, are explained and, as it were, justified upon 
some theory of hereditary bias. Such and such qualities 
he got from a grandfather on the spear or a great-uncle 
on the spindle side. This gift came in a right line from 



CHAUCER. 247 

So-and-so ; that failing came in by the dilution of the 
family blood with that of Such-a-one. In this way a 
certain allowance is made for every aberration from some 
assumed normal type, either in the way of reinforcement 
or defect, and that universal desire of the human mind 
to have everything accounted for — which makes the 
moon responsible for the whimsies of the weathercock — 
is cheaply gratified. But as mankind in the aggregate 
is always wiser than any single man, because its experi- 
ence is derived from a larger range of observation and 
experience, and because the springs that feed it drain a 
wider region both of time and space, there is commonly 
some greater or smaller share of truth in all popular 
prejudices. The meteorologists are beginning to agree 
with the old women that the moon is an accessary before 
the fact in our atmospheric fluctuations. Now, although 
to admit this notion of inherited good or ill to its fullest 
extent would be to abolish personal character, and with 
it all responsibility, to abdicate freewill, and to make 
every effort at self-direction futile, there is no inconsid- 
erable alloy of truth in it, nevertheless. No man can 
look into the title-deeds of what may be called his per- 
sonal estate, his faculties, his predilections, his failings, 
— whatever, in short, sets him apart as a capital I, — 
without something like a shock of dread to find how 
much of him is held in mortmain by those who, though 
long ago mouldered away to dust, are yet fatally alive 
and active in him for good or ill. What is true of indi- 
vidual men is true also of races, and the prevailing belief 
in a nation as to the origin of certain of its character- 
istics has something of the same basis in facts of obser- 
vation as the village estimate of the traits of particular 
families. Interdum valgus rectum videt. 

We are apt, it is true, to talk rather loosely about our 
Anglo-Saxon ancestors, and to attribute to them in a 



248 CHAUCER. 

vague way all the pith of our institutions and the 
motive power of our progress. For my own part, I 
think there is such a thing as being too Anglo-Saxon, 
and the warp and woof of the English national charac- 
ter, though undoubtedly two elements mainly predomi- 
nate in it, is quite too complex for us to pick out a 
strand here and there, and affirm that the body of the 
fabric is of this or that. Our present concern with the 
Saxons is chiefly a literary one ; but it leads to a study 
of general characteristics. What, then, so far as we can 
make it out, seems to be their leading mental feature ] 
Plainly, understanding, common-sense, — a faculty which 
never carries its possessor very high in creative litera- 
ture, though it may make him great as an acting and 
even thinking man. Take Dr. Johnson as an instance. 
The Saxon, as it appears to me, has never shown any 
capacity for art, nay, commonly commits ugly blunders 
when he is tempted in that direction. He has made the 
best working institutions and the ugliest monuments 
among the children of men. He is wanting in taste, 
which is as much as to say that he has no true sense of 
proportion. His genius is his solidity, — an admirable 
foundation of national character. He is healthy, in no 
danger of liver-complaint, with digestive apparatus of 
amazing force and precision. He is the best farmer and 
best grazier among men, raises the biggest crops and the 
fattest cattle, and consumes proportionate quantities of 
both. He settles and sticks like a diluvial deposit on 
the warm, low-lying levels, physical and moral. He has 
a prodigious talent, to use our Yankee phrase, of staying 
2 1 id. You cannot move him ; he and rich earth have a 
natural sympathy of cohesion. Not quarrelsome, but 
with indefatigable durability of fight in him, sound of 
stomach, and not too refined in nervous texture, he is 
capable of indefinitely prolonged punishment, with a 



CHAUCER. 249 

singularly obtuse sense of propriet}^ in acknowledging 
himself beaten. Among all races perhaps none has 
shown so acute a sense of- the side on which its bread 
is buttered, and so great a repugnance for having fine 
phrases take the place of the butyraceous principle. 
They invented the words " humbug," " cant," " sham," 
"gag," " soft-sodder," "flapdoddle," and other disen- 
chanting formulas w r hereby the devil of falsehood and 
unreality gets his effectual apage Satana ! 

An imperturbable perception of the real relations of 
things is the Saxon's leading quality, — no sense what- 
ever, or at best small, of the ideal in him. He has no 
notion that two and two ever make five ; which is the 
problem the poet often has to solve. Understanding, 
that is, equilibrium of mind, intellectual good digestion, 
this, with unclogged biliary ducts, makes him mentally 
and physically what w r e call a very fixed fact ; but you 
shall not find a poet in a hundred thousand square miles, 
— in many prosperous centuries of such. But one 
element of incalculable importance we have not men- 
tioned. In this homely nature, the idea of God, and of 
a simple and direct relation between the All-Father and 
his children, is deeply rooted. There, above all, will he 
have honesty and simplicity ; less than anything else 
will he have the sacramental wafer, — that beautiful 
emblem of our dependence on Him who giveth the daily 
bread ; less than anything will he have this smeared 
with that Barmecide butter of fair words. This is the 
lovely and noble side of his character. Indignation at 
this will make him forget crops and cattle ; and this, 
after so many centuries, will give him at last a poet in 
the monk of Eisleben, who shall cut deep on the memory 
of mankind that brief creed of conscience, — " Here am 
I . God help me : I cannot otherwise." This, it seems to 
me, with dogged sense of justice, — both results of that 
11* 



250 CHAUCER. 

equilibrium of thought which springs from clear-sighted 
understanding, — makes the beauty of the Saxon nature. 

He believes in another world, and conceives of it with- 
out metaphysical subtleties as something very much 
after the pattern of this, but infinitely more desirable. 
Witness the vision of John Bunyan. Once beat it into 
him that his eternal well-being t as he calls it, depends 
on certain conditions, that only so will the balance in 
the ledger of eternity be in his favor, and the man who 
seemed wholly of this world will give all that he has, 
even his life, with a superb simplicity and scorn of the 
theatric, for a chance in the next. Hard to move, his 
very solidity of nature makes him terrible when once 
fairly set agoing. He is the man of all others slow to 
admit the thought of revolution ; but let him once admit 
it, he will carry it through and make it stick, — a secret 
hitherto undiscoverable by other races. 

But poetry is not made * out of the understanding; 
that is not the sort of block out of which you can carve 
wing-footed Mercuries. The question of common-sense 
is always, "What is it good forV' — a question which 
would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly 
by the cabbage. The danger of the prosaic type of 
mind lies in the stolid sense of superiority which blinds 
it to everything ideal, to the use of anything that does 
not serve the practical purposes of life. Do we not re- 
member how the all-observing and all-fathoming Shake- 
speare has typified this in Bottom the weaver 1 ? Sur- 
rounded by all the fairy ' creations of fancy, he sends 
one to fetch him the bag of a humble-bee, and can find 
no better employment for Mustard-seed than to help 
Cavalero Cobweb scratch his ass's head between the ears. 
When Titan i a, queen of that fair ideal world, offers him 
a feast of beauty, he says he has a good stomach to a 
pottle of hay ! 



CHAUCER. 251 

The Anglo-Saxons never had any real literature of 
their own. They produced monkish chronicles in bad 
Latin, and legends of saints in worse metre. Their 
earlier poetry is essentially Scandinavian. It was that 
gens inclytissima Northmannorum that imported the 
divine power of imagination, — that power which, min- 
gled with the solid Saxon understanding, produced at 
last the miracle of Stratford. It was to this adventur- 
ous race, which found America before Columbus, which, 
for the sake of freedom of thought, could colonize in- 
hospitable Iceland, which, as it were, typifying the very 
action of the imaginative faculty itself, identified itself 
always with what it conquered, that we owe whatever 
aquiline features there are in the national physiognomy 
of the English race. It was through the Normans that 
the English mind and fancy, hitherto provincial and 
uncouth, were first infused with the lightness, grace, 
and self-confidence of Romance literature. They seem 
to have opened a window to the southward in that solid 
and somewhat sombre insular character, and it was a 
painted window all aglow with the figures of tradition 
and poetry. The old Gothic volume, grim with legends 
of devilish temptation and satanic lore, they illuminated 
with the gay and brilliant inventions of a softer climate 
and more genial moods. Even the stories of Arthur 
and his knights, toward which the stern Dante himself 
relented so far as to call them gratissimas ambages, most 
delightful circumlocutions, though of British original, 
were first set free from the dungeon of a barbarous 
dialect by the French poets, and so brought back to 
England, and made popular there by the Normans. 

Chaucer, to whom French must have been almost as 
truly a mother tongue as English, was familiar with all 
that had been done by Troubadour or Trouvere. In 
him w T e see the first result of the Norman yeast upon 



252 CHAUCER. 

the home-baked Saxon loaf. The flour had been honest, 
the paste well kneaded, but the inspiring leaven was 
wanting till the Norman brought it' over. Chaucer 
works still in the solid material of his race, but with 
what airy lightness has he not infused it] Without 
ceasing to be English, he has escaped from being insular. 
But he was something more than this ; he was a scholar, 
a thinker, and a critic. He had studied the Divina 
Com/media of Dante, he had read Petrarca and Boccaccio, 
and some of the Latin poets. He calls» Dante the great 
poet of Italy, and Petrarch a learned clerk. It is plain 
that he knew very well the truer purpose of poetry, and 
had even arrived at the higher wisdom of comprehend- 
ing the aptitudes and limitations of his own genius. 
He saw clearly and felt keenly what were the faults 
and what the wants of the prevailing literature of his 
country. In the " Monk's Tale " he slyly satirizes the 
long-winded morality of Gower, as his prose antitype, 
Fielding, was to satirize the prolix sentimentality of 
Richardson. In the rhyme of Sir Thopas he gives the 
coup de grace to the romances of Chivalry, and in his 
own choice of a subject he heralds that new world in 
which the actual and the popular were to supplant the 
fantastic and the heroic. 

Before Chaucer, modern Europe had given birth to one 
great poet, Dante ; and contemporary with him was one 
supremely elegant one, Petrarch. Dante died only 
seven years before Chaucer was born, and, so far as 
culture is derived from books, the moral and intellect- 
ual influences they had been subjected to, the specu- 
lative stimulus that may have given an impulse to 
their minds, — there could have been no essential differ- 
ence between them. Yet there are certain points of resem- 
blance and of contrast, and those not entirely fanci- 
ful, which seem to me of considerable interest. Both 



CHAUCER. 253 

were of mixed race, Dante certainly, Chaucer presum- 
ably so. Dante seems to have inherited on the Teutonic 
side the strong moral sense, the almost nervous irrita- 
bility of conscience, and the tendency to mysticism which 
made him the first of Christian poets, — first in point 
of time and first in point of greatness. From the other 
side he seems to have received almost in overplus a feel- 
ing of order and proportion, sometimes wellnigh harden- 
ing into mathematical precision and formalism, — a 
tendency which at last brought the poetry of the Ro- 
manic races to a dead-lock of artifice and decorum. 
Chaucer, on the other hand, drew from the South a 
certain airiness of sentiment and expression, a felicity of 
phrase, and an elegance of turn hitherto unprecedented 
and hardly yet matched in our literature, but all the 
while kept firm hold of his native soundness of under- 
standing, and that genial humor which seems to be the 
proper element of worldly wisdom. With Dante, life 
represented the passage of the soul from a state of na- 
ture to a state of grace ; and there would have been 
almost an even chance whether (as Burns says) the 
Divina Commedia had turned out a song or a sermon, 
but for the wonderful genius of its author, which has 
compelled the sermon to sing and the song to preach, 
whether they would or no. With Chaucer, life is a pil- 
grimage, but only that his eye may be delighted with 
the varieties of costume and character. There are good 
morals to be found in Chaucer, but they are always inci- 
dental. With Dante the main question is the saving of 
the soul, with Chaucer it is the conduct of life. The 
distance between them is almost that between holiness 
and prudence. Dante applies himself to the realities 
and Chaucer to the scenery of life, and the former is 
consequently the more universal poet, as the latter is 
the more truly national one. Dante represents the 



254 CHAUCER. 

justice of God, and Chaucer his loving-kindness. If 
there is anything that may properly be called satire in 
the one, it is like a blast of the divine wrath, before 
which the wretches cower and tremble, which rends 
away their cloaks of hypocrisy and their masks of worldly 
propriety, and leaves them shivering in the cruel naked- 
ness of their shame. The satire of the other is genial 
with the broad sunshine of humor, into which the vic- 
tims w r alk forth with a delightful unconcern, laying aside 
of themselves the disguises that seem to make them un- 
comfortably warm, till they have made a thorough be- 
trayal of themselves so unconsciously that we almost 
pity while we laugh. Dante shows us the punishment 
of sins against God and one's neighbor, in order that we 
may shun them, and so escape the doom that awaits them 
in the other world. Chaucer exposes the cheats of the 
transmitter of metals, of the begging friars, and of the 
pedlers of indulgences, in order that we may be on our 
guard against them in this world. If we are to judge of 
what is national only by the highest and most charac- 
teristic types, surely we cannot fail to see in Chaucer 
the true forerunner and prototype of Shakespeare, who, 
with an imagination of far deeper grasp, a far wider 
reach of thought, yet took the same delight in the 
pageantry of the actual world, and whose moral is the 
moral of worldly wisdom only heightened to the level 
of his wide-viewing mind, and made typical by the dra- 
matic energy of his plastic nature. 

Yet if Chaucer had little of that organic force of life 
which so inspires the poem of Dante that, as he himself 
says of the heavens, part answers to part with mutual 
interchange of light, he had a structural faculty which 
distinguishes him from all other English poets, his con- 
temporaries, and which indeed is the primary distinction 
of poets properly so called. There is, to be sure, only 



CHAUCER. 255 

ono other English writer coeval with himself who de- 
serves in any way to be compared with him, and that 
rather for contrast than for likeness. 

With the single exception of Langland, the English 
poets, his contemporaries, were little else than had 
versifiers of legends classic or mediaeval, as happened, 
without selection and without art. Chaucer is the first 
who broke away from the dreary traditional style, and 
gave not merely stories, but lively ]nctures of real life as 
the ever-renewed substance of poetry. He was a re- 
former, too, not only in literature, but in morals. But 
as in the former his exquisite tact saved him from all 
eccentricity, so in the latter the pervading sweetness of 
his nature could never be betrayed into harshness and 
invective. He seems incapable of indignation. He 
mused good-naturedly over the vices and follies of men, 
and, never forgetting that he was fashioned of the same 
clay, is rather apt to pity than condemn. There is no 
touch of cynicism in all he wrote. Dante's brush seems 
sometimes to have been smeared with the burning pitch 
of his own fiery lake. Chaucer's pencil is dipped in the 
cheerful color-box of the old illuminators, and he has 
their patient delicacy of touch, with a freedom far be- 
yond their somewhat mechanic brilliancy. 

English narrative poetry, as Chaucer found it, though 
it had not altogether escaped from the primal curse of 
long-windedness so painfully characteristic of its pro- 
totype, the French Romance of Chivalry, had certainly 
shown a feeling for the picturesque, a sense of color, a 
directness of phrase, and a simplicity of treatment which 
give it graces of its own and a turn peculiar to itself. 
In the easy knack of story-telling, the popular minstrels 
cannot compare with Marie de France. The lightsome- 
ness of fancy, that leaves a touch of sunshine and is 
gone, is painfully missed in them all. Their incidents 



256 CHAUCER.. 

enter dispersedly, as the old stage directions used to 

say, and they have not learned the art of concentrating 

their force on the key-point of their hearers' interest. 

They neither get fairly hold of their subject, nor, what is 

more important, does it get hold of them. But they 

sometimes yield to an instinctive hint of leaving-off at 

the right moment, and in their happy negligence achieve 

an effect only to be matched by the highest successes of 

art. 

" That lady heard his mourning all 
Right under her chamber wall, 
In her oriel where she was, 
Closed well with royal glass; 
Fulfilled it was with imagery 
Every window, by and by; 
On each side had there a gin 
Sperred with many a divers pin; 
Anon that lady fair and free 
Undid a pin of ivory 
And wide the window she open set, 
The sun shone in at her closet." 

It is true the old rhymer relapses a little into the habit- 
ual drone of his class, and shows half a mind to bolt 
into their common inventory style when he comes to his 
gins and pins, but he withstands the temptation man- 
fully, and his sunshine fills our hearts with a gush as 
sudden as that which illumines the lady's oriel. Cole- 
ridge and Keats have each in his way felt the charm of 
this w r insome picture, but have hardly equalled its hearty 
honesty, its economy of material, the supreme test of 
artistic skill. I admit that the phrase " had there a 
gin " is suspicious, and suggests a French original, but I 
remember nothing altogether so good in the romances 
from the other side of the Channel. One more passage 
occurs to me, almost incomparable in its simple straight- 
forward force and choice of the right word. 

" Sir Graysteel to his death thus fhraws, 
He welters [wallows] and the grass updraws; 



CHAUCER. 257 

A little while then lay he still, 
(Friends that saw him liked full ill,) 
And bled into his armor bright." 

The last line, for suggestive reticence, almost deserves 
to be put beside the famous 

" Quel giorno piii non vi leggemmo avante " 

of the great master of laconic narration. In the same 
poem * the growing love of the lady, in its maidenliness 
of unconscious betrayal, is touched with a delicacy and 
tact as surprising as they are delightful. But such pas- 
sages, which are the despair of poets who have to work 
in a language that has faded into diction, are exceptional. 
They are to be set down rather to good lack than to art. 
Even the stereotyped similes of these fortunate illiterates, 
like " weary as water in a weir," or " glad as grass is of 
the rain," are mew, like nature, at the thousandth repe- 
tition. Perhaps our jDalled taste overvalues the wild 
flavor of these wayside treasure-troves. They are wood- 
strawberries, prized in proportion as we must turn over 
more leaves ere we find one. This popular literature is 
of value in helping us toward a juster estimate of Chaucer 
by showing what the mere language was capable of, and 
that all it wanted was a poet to put it through its paces. 
For though the poems I have quoted be, in their present 
form, later than he, they are, after all, but modernized 
versions of older copies, which they doubtless reproduce 
with substantial fidelity. 

It is commonly assumed that Chaucer did for English 
what Dante is supposed to have done for Italian and 
Luther for German, that he, in short, in some hitherto 
inexplicable way, created it. But this is to speak loosely 
and without book. Languages are never made in any 

* Sir Eger and Sir Grine in the Percy Folio. The passage quoted 
is from Ellis. 



258 CHAUCER. 

such fashion, still less are they the achievement of any- 
single man, however great his genius, however powerful 
his individuality. They shape themselves by laws as 
definite as those which guide and limit the growth of 
other living organisms. Dante, indeed, has told us that 
he chose to write in the tongue that might be learned of 
nurses and chafferers in the market. His practice shows 
that he knew perfectly well that poetry has needs which 
cannot be answered by the vehicle of vulgar commerce 
between man and man. What he instinctively felt was, 
that there was the living heart of all speech, without 
whose help the brain were powerless to send will, motion, 
meaning, to the limbs and extremities. But it is true 
that a language, as respects the uses of literature, is lia- 
ble to a kind of syncope. No matter how complete its 
vocabulary may be, how thorough an outfit of inflections 
and case-endings it may have, it is a mere dead body 
without a soul till some man of genius set its arrested 
pulses once more athrob, and show what wealth of sweet- 
ness, scorn, persuasion, and passion lay there awaiting its 
liberator. In this sense it is hardly too much to say 
that Chaucer, like Dante, found his native tongue a dia- 
lect and left it a language. But it was not what he did 
with deliberate purpose of reform, it was his kindly and 
plastic genius that wrought this magic of renewal and 
inspiration. It was not the new words he introduced,* 
but his way of using the old ones, that surprised them 
into grace, ease, and dignity in their own despite. In 
order to feel fully how much he achieved, let any one 
subject himself to a penitential course of reading in his 
contemporary, Gower, who worked in a material to all 
intents and purposes the same, or listen for a moment 
to the barbarous jangle which Lydgate and Occleve con- 
trive to draw from the instrument their master had tuned 

* I think he tried one now and then, like " eyen columbine." 



CHAUCEE. 259 

so deftly. Gower has positively raised tediousness to the 
precision of science, he has made dulness an heirloom for 
the students of our literary history. As you slip to and 
fro on the frozen levels of his verse, which give no foot- 
hold to the mind, as your nervous ear awaits the inevita- 
ble recurrence of his rhyme, regularly pertinacious as 
the tick of an eight-day clock and reminding you of 
Wordsworth's 

" Once more the ass did lengthen out 
The hard, dry, seesaw of his horrible bray," 

you learn to dread, almost to respect, the powers of this 
indefatigable man. He is the undertaker of the fair 
mediaeval legend, and his style has the hateful gloss, the 
seemingly unnatural length, of a coffin. Love, beauty, 
passion, nature, art, life, the natural and theological vir- 
tues, — there is nothing beyond his power to disenchant, 
nothing out of which the tremendous hydraulic press of 
his allegory (or whatever it is, for I am not sure if it be 
not something even worse) will not squeeze all feeling 
and freshness and leave it a juiceless pulp. It matters 
not where you try him, whether his story be Christian 
or pagan, borrowed froin history or fable, you cannot 
escape him. Dip in at the middle or the end, dodge 
back to the beginning, the patient old man is there to 
take you by the button and go on with his imperturba- 
ble narrative. You may have left off with Clytemnes- 
tra, and you begin again with Samson ; it makes no 
odds, for you cannot tell one from tother. His tedious- 
ness is omnipresent, and like Dogberry he could find in 
his heart to bestow it all (and more if he had it) on your 
worship. The word lengthy has been charged to our 
American account, but it must have been invented by 
the first reader of Gower's works, the only inspiration of 
which they were eftr capable. Our literature had to lie 
by and recruit for more than four centuries ere it could 



260 CHAUCER. 

give us an equal vacuity in Tupper, so persistent a uni- 
formity of commonplace in the " Recreations of a Coun- 
try Parson." Let us be thankful that the industrious 
Gower never found time for recreation ! 

But a fairer as well as more instructive comparison lies 
between Chaucer and the author of " Piers Ploughman." 
Langland has as much tenderness, as much interest in 
the varied picture of life, as hearty a contempt for hy- 
pocrisy, and almost an equal sense of fun. He has the 
same easy abundance of matter. But what a difference ! 
It is the difference between the poet and the man of 
poetic temperament. The abundance of the one is a con- 
tinual fulness within the fixed limits of good taste ; that 
of the other is squandered in overflow. The one can be 
profuse on occasion ; the other is diffuse whether he will 
or no. The one is full of talk ; the other is garrulous. 
What in one is the refined bonhomie of a man of the world, 
is a rustic shrewdness in the other. Both are kindly in 
their satire, and have not (like too many reformers) that 
vindictive love of virtue which spreads the stool of re- 
pentance w T ith thistle-burrs before they invite the erring 
to seat themselves therein. But what in " Piers Plough- 
man " is sly fun, has the breadth and depth of humor in 
Chaucer ; and it is plain that wdiile the former was taken 
up by his moral purpose, the main interest of the latter 
turned to perfecting the form of his work. In short, 
Chaucer had that fine literary sense wdiich is as rare as 
genius, and, united with it, as it was in him, assures an 
immortality of fame. It is not merely what he has to 
sa} T , but even more the agreeable way he has of saying it, 
that captivates our attention and gives him an assured 
place in literature. Above all, it is not in detached pas- 
sages that his charm lies, but in the entirety of expression 
and the cumulative effect of many particulars working 
toward a common end. Now though ex ungate leonem be 



CHAUCER. 261 

a good rule in comparative anatomy, its application, ex- 
cept in a very limited way, in criticism is sure to mislead ; 
for we should always bear in mind that the really great 
writer is great in the mass, and is to be tested less by his 
cleverness in the elaboration of parts than by that reach 
of mind which is.incapable of random effort, which selects, 
arranges, combines, rejects, denies itself the cheap tri- 
umph of immediate effects, because it is absorbed by the 
controlling charm of proportion and unity. A careless 
good-luck of phrase is delightful ; but criticism cleaves to 
the teleological argument, and distinguishes the creative 
intellect, not so much by any happiness of natural endow- 
ment as by the marks of design. It is true that one may 
sometimes discover by a single verse whether an author 
have imagination, or may make a shrewd guess whether 
he have style or no, just as by a few spoken words you 
may judge of a man's accent; but the true artist in 
language is never spotty, and needs no guide-boards of 
admiring italics, a critical method introduced by Leigh 
Hunt, whose feminine temperament gave him acute per- 
ceptions at the expense of judgment. This is the Boeotian 
method, which offers us a brick as a sample of the house, 
forgetting that it is not the goodness of the separate 
bricks,, but the way in which they are put together, that 
brings them within the province of art, and makes the 
difference between a heap and a house. A great writer 
does not reveal himself here and there, but everywhere. 
Langland's verse runs mostly like a brook, with a beguil- 
ing and wellnigh slumberous prattle, but he, more often 
than any writer of his class, flashes into salient lines, gets 
inside our guard with the home-thrust of a forthright 
word, and he gains if taken piecemeal. His imagery is 
naturally and vividly picturesque, as where he says of 
Old Age, — 



262 CHAUCER. 

" Eld the hoar 

That was in the vauntwtrd, 
And bare the banner before death," — 

and he softens to a sweetness of sympathy beyond Chau- 
cer when he speaks of the poor or tells us that Mercy is 
" sib of all sinful " ; but to compare " Piers Ploughman " 
with the " Canterbury Tales " is to compare sermon with 
song. 

Let us put a bit of Langland's satire beside one of 
Chaucer's. Some people in search of Truth meet a pil- 
grim and ask him whence he comes. He gives a long 
list of holy places, appealing for proof to the relics on his 
hat : — 

" ' I have walked full wide in wet and in dry 
And sought saints for my soul's health.' 
' Know'st thou ever a relic that is called Truth ? 
Couldst thou show us the way where that Avight dwelleth? ' 
' Nay, so God help me,' said the man then, 
1 1 saw never palmer with staff nor with scrip 
Ask after him ever till now in this place.' " 

This is a good hit, and the poet is satisfied ; but, in what 
I am going to quote from Chaucer, everything becomes 
picture, over which lies broad and warm the sunshine of 
humorous fancy. 

" In olde' dayes of the King Artour 
Of which that Britouns speken gret honour, 
All was this lond fulfilled of fayerie : 
The elf-queen with her joly compaignie 
Danced ful oft in many a grene mede: 
This was the old opinion as I rede; 
I speke of many hundrid yer ago: 
But now can no man see none elves mo, 
For now the grete charite and prayeres 
Of lymytours and other holy freres 
That sechen every lond and every streem, 
As thick as motis in the sonnebeam, 
Blessyng hallos, chambres, kichenes, and boures, 
Citees and burghes, castels hihe and toures, 
Thorpes and bernes, shepnes and dayeries, 
This mnkith that thcr ben no fayeries. 
For ther as wont to walken was an elf 



CHAUCER. 2G3 

There walkith none but the lymytour himself, 

In undermeles and in morwenynges, 

And sayth his matyns and his holy thinges, 

As he goth in his lymytatioun. 

Wommen may now go saufly up and doun ; 

In every bush or under every tre 

There is none other incubus but he, 

And he ne wol doon hem no dishonour." 

How cunningly the contrast is suggested here between 
the Elf-queen's jolly company and the unsocial limiters, 
thick as motes in the sunbeam, yet each walking by him- 
self ! And with what an air of innocent unconsciousness 
is the deadly thrust of the last verse given, with its con- 
temptuous emphasis on the he that seems so well-mean- 
ing ! Even Shakespeare, who seems to come in after 
everybody has done his best with a "Let me take hold 
a minute and show you how to do it," could not have 
bettered this. 

"Piers Ploughman" is the best example I know of what 
is called popular poetry, — of compositions, that is, which 
contain all the simpler elements of poetry, but still in 
solution, not crystallized around any thread of artistic 
purpose. In it appears at her best the Anglo-Saxon Muse, 
a first cousin of Poor Richard, full of proverbial wisdom, 
who always brings her knitting in her pocket, and seems 
most at home in the chimney-corner. It is genial ; it 
plants itself firmly on human nature with its rights and 
wrongs ; it has a surly honesty, prefers the downright to 
the gracious, and conceives of speech as a tool rather 
than a musical instrument. If we should seek for a 
single word that would define it most precisely, w r e should 
not choose simplicity, but homeliness. There is more 
or less of this in all early poetry, to be sure ; but I think 
it especially proper to English poets, and to the most 
English among them, like Cowper, Crabbe, and one is 
tempted to add Wordsworth, — where he forgets Cole- 
ridge's private lectures. In reading such poets as Lang- 



12G-JL GHAUOER. 

land, also, wo are qoI to forget a certain charm of dis- 
tance in the very language they use, making it unhack- 
neyed without being alien. As it is the chief function 
of the poet to make the familiar novel, those fortunate 
early risers of literature, who gather phrases with the 

dew still on them, have their poetry done for them, as 

it were, by their vocabulary. Bui iii Chaucer, as in all 
greal poets, the language gets itscharmfrom him. The 
force and Bweetness of his genius kneaded more kindly 
together the Latin and Teutonic elements of our mother 

tongue, and made something hotter than either. The 

necessity of writing poetry, and not mere verse, made 
him a reformer whether he would or no ; and the instinct 

of his liner ear was a guide siu'h as none before him OT 
contemporary with him, nor indeed any that came after 
him, till Spenser, could command. (lower had no notion 
o( the uses o( rhyme except as a kind of crease at the 
end of every eighth syllable, where the verso was to he 
folded over again into another layer, lie says, for ex- 
ample, 

" This maiden Canaoee was night, 
Both in the day and eke by night," 

as if people commonly changed their names at dark. 
And he could not even oontrive to say this without the 
clumsy pleonasm of both and </v. Chaucer was put to 
no such shifts of piecing out his metre with loose-woven 
hits of baser stuff. He himself savs, in the "Man o[' 
Law's Tale," — 

•• Mo lists not of the chaff nor of the straw 
To make so long a tale as of the corn." 

One of the world's three or tour great story-tellers, he 

was also one o\' the host versifiers that over made Eng- 
lish trip and sing with a gayety that scorns careless, hut 
where every toot heats time to the tune of the thought. 
By the skilful arrangement oi' his pauses he evaded the 



CHAUCEB. 2G5 

monotony of tlie couplet, and gave to the rhymed pen- 
tameter, which lie made our heroic measure, something 
of the architectural repose of blank verse. He found 
our language Lumpish, stiff, unwilling, too apt to speak 
Saxonly in grouty monosyllables; lie left it enriched 
with the longer measure of the Italian and Provencal 
poets. He reconciled, in the harmony of his verse, Hie 
English bluntnesa with the dignity and elegance of the 
less homely Southern speech. Though lie did not and 
could not create our language (for he who writes to he 
read does not write for linguisters), yet it is true that, he 
first made it easy, and to that extent modern, so that 
Spenser, two hundred years later, studied his method 
and called him master. He first wrote English ; and it 
was a feeling of this, I suspect, that made it fashionable 
in Elizabeth's day to " talk pure Chaucer." Already wo 
find in his works verses that might pass without question 
in Milton or even Wordsworth, so mainly unchanged 
have the language of poetry and the movement of verse 
remained from his day to our own. 

" Thou Polymnia 
On Pe"rnaso, that, with * thy sisters glade, 
By Helicon, not far from Cirrea, 
Singest with voice memorial in the shade, 
Under the laurel which that may not fade." 
" And downward from a hill under a bent 
There stood the temple of Mars omnipotent 

Wrought all of burned steel, of which th' entree 
Was long and strait and ghastly for to see: 
The northern light in at the doores shone 
For window in the wall ne was there none 
Through which men mighteri any light discerne; 
The dore was all of adamant eteme." 

And here are some lines that would not seem out of 

place in the; " Paradise of Dainty Devises" : — 

" Hide, Absolom, thy gilte [gilded] tresses clear, 
Esther lay thou thy meekness all adown. 

* Commonly printed hatli. 
12 



266 CHAUCER. 



Make of your wifehood no comparison ; 
Hide ye your beauties Ysoude and Elaine, 
My lady cometh, that all this may distain." 

When I remember Chaucer's malediction upon his scriv- 
ener, and consider that by far the larger proportion of 
his verses (allowing always for change of pronunciation) 
are perfectly accordant w r ith our present accentual sys- 
tem, I cannot believe that he ever wrote an imperfect 
line. His ear would never have tolerated the verses of 
nine syllables, with a strong accent on the first, at- 
tributed to him by Mr. Skeate and Mr. Morris. Such 
verses seem to me simply impossible in the pentameter 
iambic as Chaucer wrote it. A great deal of misappre- 
hension would be avoided in discussing English metres, 
if it were only understood that quantity in Latin and 
quantity in English mean very different things. Perhaps 
the best quantitative verses in our language (better even 
than Coleridge's) are to be found in Mother Goose, com- 
posed by nurses wholly by ear and beating time as they 
danced the baby on their knee. I suspect Chaucer and 
Shakespeare would be surprised into a smile by the 
learned arguments w T hich supply their halting verses 
with every kind of excuse except that of being readable. 
When verses were written to be chanted, more license 
could be allowed, for the ear tolerates the widest devia- 
tions from habitual accent in words that are sung. 
Segnius irritant demissa per aurem. To some extent the 
same thing is true of anapaestic and other tripping 
measures, but we cannot admit it in marching tunes like 
those of Chaucer. He wrote for the eye more than for 
the voice, as poets had begun to do long before.* Some 

* Froissart's description of the book of traite's nmoureux et de 
morality, which he had had engrossed for presentation to Richard II. 
in 1394, is enough to bring tears to the eyes of a modern author. " Et 
lui plut tres grandement; et plaire bien lui devjit car il etait enlumine, 






CHAUCER. 267 

loose talk of Coleridge, loose in spite of its affectation 
of scientific precision, about " retardations " and the 
like, has misled many honest persons into believing that 
they can make good verse out of bad prose. Coleridge 
himself, from natural fineness of ear, was the best 
metrist among modern English poets, and, read with 
proper allowances, his remarks upon versification are 
always instructive to whoever is not rhythm-deaf. But 
one has no patience with the dyspondseuses, the paeon 
primuses, and what not, with which he darkens verses that 
are to be explained only by the contemporary habits of 
pronunciation. Till after the time of Shakespeare we 
must always bear in mind that it is not a language of 
books but of living speech that we have to deal with. 
Of this language Coleridge had little knowledge, except 
what could be acquired through the ends of his fingers 
as they lazily turned the leaves of his haphazard read- 
ing. If his eye was caught by a single passage that 
gave him a chance to theorize he did not look farther. 
Speaking of Massinger, for example, he says, "When a 
speech is interrupted, or one of the characters speaks 
aside, the last syllable of the former speech and first of 
the succeeding Massinger counts for one, because both 
are supposed to be spoken at the same moment. 

' And felt the sweetness oft 

1 Hoio her mouth runs over.' " 

Now fifty instances may be cited from Massinger which 

dcrit et historic* et eouvert de vermeil velours a dis cloux d'argent 
dor^s d'or, et roses d'or an milieu, et a deux grands fremaulx dores et 
richement ouvrds au milieu de rosiers d'or." How lovingly he lingers 
over it, hooking it together with et after et ! But two centuries earlier, 
while the jongleurs were still in full song, poems were also read aloud. 
" Pur remembrer des ancessours 
Les faits et les dits et les mours, 
Deit Ten les livres et les gestes 
Et les estoires lire a festes." — Roman du Rou. 
Bat Chaucer wrote for the private reading of the closet. 



268 CHAUCER. 

tell against this fanciful notion, for one that seems, and 
only seems, in its favor. Any one tolerably familiar with 
the dramatists knows that in the passage quoted by 
Coleridge, the how being emphatic, " how her " was pro- 
nounced hoiv V. He tells us that " Massinger is fond of 
the anapaest in the first and third foot, as : — 

4 To your mure | than mas|ciiline reajson that | commands 'cm ||.' 

Likewise of the second pseon (__ _w) in the first foot, 
followed by four trochees (_ w ), as : — 

' So greedily | long for, | know their | titilHations.' " 

In truth, he was no fonder of them than his brother 
dramatists who, like him, wrote for the voice by the ear. 
" To your " is still one syllable in ordinary speech, and 
"masculine" and "greedily" w T ere and are dissyllables 
or trisyllables according to their place in the verse. 
Coleridge was making pedantry of a very simple matter. 
Yet he has said with perfect truth of Chaucer's verso, 
" Let a few plain rules be given for sounding the final e 
of syllables, and for expressing the terminations of such 
w r ords as ocean and nation, &c, as dissyllables, — or let 
the syllables to be sounded in such cases be marked by 
a competent metrist. This simple expedient would, with 
a very few trifling exceptions, where the errors are in- 
veterate, enable any one to feel the perfect smoothness 
and harmony of Chaucer's verse." But let us keep wide- 
ly clear of Latin and Greek terms of prosody ! It is also 
more important here than even w T ith the dramatists of 
Shakespeare's time to remember that we have to do with 
a language caught more from the ear than from books. 
The best school for learning to understand Chaucer's 
elisions, compressions, slurrings-over and runnings-to- 
gether of syllables is to listen to the habitual speech of 
rustics with whom language is still plastic to meaning, and 
hurries or prolongs itself accordingly. Here is acontrac- 



CHAUCER. 269 

tion frequent in Chaucer, and still common in New Eng- 
land : — 

" But me were lever than [lever 'n] all this town, quod he." 

Let one example suffice for many. To Coleridge's rules 
another should be added by a wise editor ; and that is to 
restore the final n in the infinitive and third person plural 
of verbs, and in such other cases as can be justified by 
the authority of Chaucer himself. Surely his ear could 
never have endured the sing-song of such verses as 

" I couthe telle for a gowne-cloth," 
or 

" Than ye to me schuld breke youre trouthe." 

Chaucer's measure is so uniform (making due allowances) 
that words should be transposed or even omitted where 
the verse manifestly demands it, — and with copyists so 
long and dull of ear this is often the case. Sometimes 
they leave out a needful word : — 

" But er [the] thunder stynte, there cometh rain," 
" When [that] we ben yflattered and ypraised," 
' ; Tak [ye] him for the greatest gentleman." 

Sometimes they thrust in a word or words that hobble 

the verse : — 

" She trowed he were yfel in [some] maladie," 
" Ye faren like a man [that] had lost his wit," 
" Then have I got of you the maystrie, quod she," 
r (Then have I got the maystery, quod she,) 
" And quod the juge [also] thou must lose thy head." 

Sometimes they give a wrong word identical in mean- 
ing:— 

" And therwithal he knew [couthe] mo proverbes." 

Sometimes they change the true order of the words : — - 

" Therefore no woman of clerkes is [is of clerkes] praised" 
" His felaw lo, here he stont [stont he] hool on live." 

" He that coveteth is a pore wight 
For he wold have that is not in his might; 
But he that nought hath ne coveteth nought to have." 



270 CHAUCER. 

Here the "but " of the third verse belongs at the head 
of the first, and we get rid of the anomaly of " coveteth" 
differently accented within two lines. Nearly all the 
seemingly unmetrical verses may be righted in this way. 
I find a good example of this in the last stanza of " Troi- 
lus and Creseide." As it stands, .we read, — 

" Thou one, two, and three, eterne on live 
That raignast aie in three, two and one." 

It is plain that we should read " one and two " in the 
first verse, and " three and two " in the second. Re- 
membering, then, that Chaucer was here translating 
Dante, I turned (after making the correction) to the 
original, and found as I expected 

" Quell' uno e due e tre che sempre vive 
E regna sempre in tre e due ed uno." (Par. xiv. 28, 29.) 

In the stanza before this we have, — 

" To thee and to the philosophical strode, 
To vouchsafe [vouchesafe] there need is, to correct" ; 

and further on, — 

" With all mine herte' of mercy ever I pray 
And to the Lord aright thus I speake and say," 

where we must either strike out the second " I n or put 
it after " speake." 

One often finds such changes made by ear justified by 
the readings in other texts, and we cannot but hope that 
the Chaucer Society will give us the means of at last 
settling upon a version which shall make the poems of 
one of the most fluent of metrists at least readable. Let 
anyone compare the " Franklin's Tale " in the Aldiue 
edition* with the text given by Wright, and he will find 
both sense and metre clear themselves up in a surpris- 
ing way. A careful collation of texts, by the way, con- 

* One of the very worst, be it said in passing. 



CHAUCER. 271 

firms one's confidence in Tyrwhitt's good taste and 
thoroughness. 

A writer in the " Proceedings of the Philological Soci- 
ety" has lately undertaken to prove that Chaucer did not 
sound the final or medial e, and throws us back on the 
old theory that he wrote " riding-rime," that is, verse to 
the eye and not the ear. This he attempts to do by 
showing that the Anglo-Norman poets themselves did 
not sound the e, or, at any rate, were not uniform in so 
doing. It should seem a sufficient answer to this merely 
to ask whence modern French poetry derived its rules of 
pronunciation so like those of Chaucer, so different from 
those of prose. But it is not enough to prove that 
some of the Anglo-Norman rhymers were bad versifiers. 
Let us look for examples in the works of the best poet 
among them all, Marie de France, with whose works 
Chaucer was certainly familiar. What was her practice % 
I open at random and find enough to overthrow tho 
whole theory : — 

" Od sa fille * ke le cela — 
Tut li enrages li fremi — 
Di mei, fet-ele par ta fei — 
La Dameisele l'aporta — 
Kar ne li sembla mie boens — 
La dame l'aveit apelee — 
Et la mere Tareisuna." 

But how about the elision % 

" Le palf esgarde sur le lit — 
Et ele' est devant li aide — 
Bele' amie [cf. mie, above] ne'zl me celez. 
La dame' ad sa fille' amende." 

These are all on a single page f , and there are some to 

* Whence came, pray, the Elizabethan commandement, chapelain, 
surety, and a score of others? Whence the Scottish bonny, and so 
many English words of Romance derivation ending in yt 

f Podsies de Marie de France, Tome I. p. 108. 



272 CHAUCER. 

spare. How about the hiatus? On the same page 

I find, — 

" Kar l'Erceveske i estoit — 
Pur eus beneistre' e enseiner." 

What was the practice of Wace 1 Again I open at ran- 
dom. 

"N'osa remaindre' en Noi-mandie, 
Maiz, quant la guerre fu finie, 
Od sou herneiz en Puille' ala — 
Cil de Baienes lungement — 
Ne i\ nes pout par force prendre — 
Dune la vile mult amendout, 
Prisons e preies amenout." * 

Again we have the sounded final e, the elision, and the 
hiatus. But what possible reason is there for supposing 
that Chaucer would go to obscure minstrels to learn the 
rules of French versification % Nay, why are we to sup- 
pose that he followed them at all 1 In his case as in 
theirs, as in that of the Italians, with the works of whose 
two greater poets he was familiar, it was the language 
itself and the usages of pronunciation that guided the 
poet, and not arbitrary laws laid down by a synod of 
versemakers. Chaucer's verse differs from that of Gower 
and Lydgate precisely as the verse of Spenser differs 
from that of Gascoigne, and for the same reason, — that 
he was a great poet, to whom measure was a natural ve- 
hicle. But admitting that he must have formed his 
style on the French poets, would he not have gone for 
lessons to the most famous and popular among them, — ■ 
the authors of the " Roman de la Rose " 1 Wherever 
you open that poem, you find Guillaume de Lorris and 
Jean de Meung following precisely the same method, — a 
method not in the least arbitrary, but inherent in the 
material which they wrought. The e sounded or ab- 
sorbed under the same conditions, the same slurring of 

* Le Roman de la Rose, Tome II. p. 390. 



CHAUCER. 273 

diphthongs, the same occasional hiatus, the same compres- 
sion of several vowels into one sound where they imme- 
diately follow each other. Shakespeare and Milton would 
supply examples enough of all these practices that seem 
so incredible to those who write about versification with- 
out sufficient fineness of sense to feel the difference be- 
tween Ben Jonson's blank verse and Marlow's. Some 
men are verse-deaf as others are color-blind, — Messrs. 
Malone and Guest, for example. 

I try Rutebeuf in the same haphazard way, and chance 
brings me upon his " Pharisian." This poem is in stan- 
zas, the verses of the first of which have all of them 
masculine rhymes, those of the second feminine ones, and 
so on in such continual alternation to the end, as to show 
that it was done with intention to avoid monotony. Of 
feminine rhymes w T e find ypocrisie, fame, justice, mesure, 
yglise. But did Rutebeuf mean so to pronounce them 1 
I open again at the poem of the Secrestain, which is writ- 
ten in regular octosyllabics, and read, — 

" Envie fet home tuer, 
Et si fait bonne remuer — 
Envie greve', en vie blece, 
Envie' confont charite 
Envie' ocist humilite, — 
Estoit en ce pais en vie 
Sanz orgueil ere' et sanz envie — 
La glorieuse, dame, chiere'." * 

Froissart was Chaucer's contemporary. What was his 
usage % 

" J'avoie fait en ce voiaige 

Et je li di, ' Ma dame s'ai-je 

Pour vous eu maint souvenir '^ 

Mais je ne sui pas bien hardis 

De vous remonstrer, dame chiere", 

Par quel art ne par quel maniere, 

J'ai eu ce comencement 
* De l'amourous atouche'ment.' " 

* Rutebeuf, Tome I. pp. 203 seqq. 304 seqq. 

12* E 



274 CHAUCER. 

If we try Philippe Mouskes, a mechanical rhymer, if 
ever there was one, and therefore the surer not to let go 
the leading-strings of rule, the result is the same. 

But Chaucer, it is argued, was not uniform in his prac- 
tice. Would this be likely 1 Certainly not with those ter- 
minations (like courtesie) which are questioned, and in 
diphthongs generally. Dante took precisely the same 
liberties. 

" Facea le stelle a noi parer piu radi," 
" Ne fu per fantasia giammaz compreso " 
"Poi pcovve dentro all 'alta fantasia," 
M Solea valor e cortesia trovarsi," 
" Che ne 'nvogliava amor e cortesia." 

Here we have fcmtasV and fantasia, cortesV and cortesid. 
Even Pope has promiscuous, obsequious, as trisyllables, 
individual as a quadrisyllable, and words like tapestry, 
opera, indifferently as trochees or dactyls according to 
their place in the verse. Donne even goes so far as to 
make Cain a monosyllable and dissyllable in the same 
verse : — 

" Sister and wife to Cain, Cain that first did plough." 

The ca3sural pause (a purely imaginary thing in ac- 
centual metres) may be made to balance a line like this 
of Donne's, 

" Are they not like | singers at doors for meat," 

but we defy any one by any trick of voice to make it 
supply a missing syllable in what is called our heroic 
measure, so mainly used by Chaucer. 

Enough and far more than enough on a question about 
which it is as hard to be patient as about the author- 
ship of Shakespeare's plays. It is easy to find all man- 
ner of bad metres among these versifiers, and plenty 
of inconsistencies, many or most of them the fault of 
careless or ignorant transcribers, but whoever has read 



CHAUCER. 275 

them thoroughly, and with enough philological knowledge 
of cognate languages to guide him, is sure that they at 
least aimed at regularity, precisely as he is convinced 
that Raynouard's rule about singular and plural termi- 
nations has plenty of evidence to sustain it, despite the 
numerous exceptions. To show what a bad versifier 
could make out of the same language that Chaucer used, 
I copy one stanza from a contemporary poem. 

" When Phebus fresh was in chare resplendent, 
In the moneth of May erly in a morning, 
I hard two lovers profer this argument 
In the yeere of our Lord a M. by rekening, 
CCCXL. and VIII. yeere following. 
potent princesse conserve true lovei's all 
And grant them thy region and blisse celestial." * 

Here is riding-rhyme, and on a very hard horse too! 
Can any one be insensible to the difference between such 
stuff as this and the measure of Chaucer % Is it possi- 
ble that with him the one halting verse should be the 
rule, and the twenty musical ones the exception 1 Let 
us take heed to his own words : — 

" And, for there is so great diversite 
In English, and in writing of our tong, 
So pray I God f that none miswrite the 
Ne the mismetre for defaut of tong, 
And redde whereso thou be or elles song 
That thou be understood God I beseech." 

Yet more. Boccaccio's ottava rima is almost as regu- 
lar as that of Tasso. Was Chaucer unconscious of this 1 
It will be worth while to compare a stanza of the origi- 
nal with one of the translation. 

" Ex*a cortese Ettore di natura 
Pero vedendo di costei il gran pianto, 
Ch 'era piu bella ch 'altra creatura, 
Con pio parlare confortolla alquanto, 

* From the " Craft of Lovers," attributed by Ritson to Lydgate, but 
too bad even for him. 

f Here the received texts give " So pray I to God." Cf. " But Rea- 
son said him.'" T. & C. 



276 CHAUCER. 

Dicendo, Iascia con la ria ventura 

Tuo padre andar che tulti ha offeso tanto, 

E tu, sicura e lieta, senza noia, 

Mentre t 'aggrada, con noi resta in Troia." * 

"Now was this Hector pitous of nature, 
And saw that she was sorrowful begon 
And that she was so fa ire a creature, 
Of his goodnesse he gladed her anon 
And said [saide] let your father's treason gon 
Forth with mischance, and ye yourself in joy 
Dwelleth with us while [that] you list in Troy." 

If the Italian were read with the same ignorance that 
has wreaked itself on Chaucer, the riding-iihyme would 
be on its high horse in almost every line of Boccaccio's 
stanza. The same might be said of many a verse in 
Donne's satires. Spenser in his eclogues for February, 
May, and September evidently took it for granted that 
he had caught the measure of Chaucer, and it would be 
rather amusing, as well as instructive, to hear the main- 
tainers of the hop-skip-and-jump theory of versification 
attempt to make the elder poet's verses dance to the tune 
for which one of our greatest metrists (in his philological 
deafness) supposed their feet to be trained. 

I will give one more example of Chaucer's verse, again 
making my selection from one of his less mature works. 
He is speaking of Tarquin : — 

" And ay the more he was in despair 
The more he coveted and thought her fair; 
His blinde lust was all his coveting. 
On morrow when the bird began to sing 
Unto the siege he cometh full privily 
And by himself he walketh soberly 
The image of her recording alway new: 
Thus lay her hair, and thus fresh was her hue, 
Thus sate, thus spake, thus span, this was her cheer, 
Thus fair she was, and this was her manere. 
All this conceit his heart hath new ytake, 
And as the sea, with tempest all toshake, 

* Corrected from Kissner, p. 18. 



CHAUCER. 277 

That after, when the storm is all ago, 
Yet will the water quap a day or two, 
Right so, though that her forme were absent, 
The pleasance of her forme was present." 

And this passage leads me to say a few words of 
Chaucer as a descriptive poet ; for I think it a great 
mistake to attribute to him any properly dramatic 
power, as some have done. Even Herr Hertzberg, in 
his remarkably intelligent essay, is led a little astray on 
this point by his enthusiasm. Chaucer is a great narra- 
tive poet ; and, in this species of poetry, though the 
author's personality should never be obtruded, it yet 
unconsciously pervades the whole, and communicates an 
individual quality, — a kind of flavor of its own. This 
very quality, and it is one of the highest in its way and 
place, would be fatal to all dramatic force. The narra- 
tive poet is occupied with his characters as picture, with 
their grouping, even their costume, it may be, and he 
feels for and with them instead of being they for the 
moment, as the dramatist must always be. The story- 
teller must possess the situation perfectly in all its de- 
tails, while the imagination of the dramatist must be 
possessed and mastered by it. The latter puts before 
us the very passion or emotion itself in its utmost inten- 
sity ; the former gives them, not in their primary form, 
but in that derivative one which they have acquired by 
passing through his own mind and being modified by hi& 
reflection. The deepest pathos of the drama, like the 
quiet " no more but so % " with which Shakespeare tell? 
us that Ophelia's heart is bursting, is sudden as a stab, 
while in narrative it is more or less suffused with pity, 
■ — a feeling capable of prolonged sustention. This pres- 
ence of the author's own sympathy is noticeable in all 
Chaucer's pathetic passages, as, for instance, in the 
lamentation of Constance over her child in the " Man of 



278 CHAUCER. 

Law's Talc." When he comes to the sorrow of his story, 
he seems to croon over his thoughts, to soothe them and 
dwell upon them with a kind of pleased compassion, as 
a child treats a wounded bird which he fears to grasp too 
tightly, and yet cannot make up his heart wholly to let 
go. It is true also of his humor that it pervades his 
comic tales like sunshine, and never dazzles the atten- 
tion by a sudden flash. Sometimes he brings it in par- 
enthetically, and insinuates a sarcasm so slyly as almost 
to slip by without our notice, as where he satirizes pro- 
vincialism by the cock 

" Who knew by nature each ascension 
Of the equinoctial in his native town." 

Sometimes he turns round upon himself and smiles at a 
trip he has made into fine writing : — 

" Till that the brighte sun had lost his hue, 
For th' orisont had reft the sun his light, 
(This is as much to sayen as ' it was night.') " 

Nay, sometimes it twinkles roguishly through his very 
tears, as in the 

" ' Why wouldest thou be dead,' these women cry, 
• Thou haddest gold enough — and Emily? ' " 

that follows so close upon the profoundly tender despair 

of Arcite's farewell : — 

" What is this world ? What asken men to have ? 
Now with his love now in the colde grave 
Alone withouten any company! " 

The power of diffusion without being diffuse would seem 
to be the highest merit of narration, giving it that easy 
flow which is so delightful. Chaucer's descriptive style 
is remarkable for its lowness of tone, — for that com- 
bination of energy with simplicity which is among the 
rarest gifts in literature. Perhaps all is said in saying 
that he has style at all, for that consists mainly in the 
absence of undue emphasis and exaggeration, in the clear 



CHAUCER. 279 

uniform pitch which penetrates our interest and retains 

it, where mere loudness would only disturb and irritate. 

Not that Chaucer cannot be intense, too, on occasion ; 

but it is with a quiet intensity of his own, that comes in 

as it were by accident. 

" Upon a thickti palfrey, paper-white, 
With saddle red embroidered with delight, 
Sits Dido: 

And she is fair as is the brighte morrow 
That healeth sicke folk of nightes sorrow. 
Upon a courser startling as the fire, 
iEneas sits." 

Pandarus, looking at Troilus, 

" Took up a light and found his countenance 
As for to look upon an old romance." 

With Chaucer it is always the thing itself and not the 
description of it that is the main object. His picturesque 
bits are incidental to the story, glimpsed in passing ; they 
never stop the way. His key is so low that his high 
lights are never obtrusive. His imitators, like Leigh 
Hunt, and Keats in his " Endymion," missing the nice 
gradation with which the master toned everything down, 
become streaky. Hogarth, who reminds one of him in 
the variety and natural action of his figures, is like him 
also in the subdued brilliancy of his coloring. When 
Chaucer condenses, it is because his conception is vivid. 
He does not need to personify Revenge, for personifica- 
tion is but the subterfuge of unimaginative and profes- 
sional poets ; but he embodies the very passion itself in 
a verse that makes us glance over our shoulder as if we 
heard a stealthy tread behind us : — 

" The smiler with the knife hid under the cloak." * 

And yet how unlike is the operation of the imaginative 
faculty in him and Shakespeare ! When the latter de- 

* Compare this with the Mumbo-Jumbo Revenge in Collins's Ode. 



280 OHAUOEB. 

scribes, his epithets imply always an impression on tho 
moral sense (so to speak) of the person who bears or sees. 
The .nil "flatters the mountain-tops with sovereign eye " \ 
the bending "weeds Laoquey the dull stream"; the 
shadow of the faloon " oouoheth the fowl below";the 
smoke is " helpless" ; when Tarquin enters the ohamber 
of Luoreoe "the threshold grates the door t<> have him 
beard." His outward sense is merely a window through 
which the metaphysical eye looks forth, and his mind 
passes over at oner from the simple sensation to the 
oomples meaning of it, feels with the objeot instead <>f 
merely feeling it. His imagination is forever drama- 
tizing. Chauoer gives only die direct impression made 

on the eye or oar. lie was the first, great poet who 

really loved out ward nature as the source of consoious 
pleasurable emotion. The Troubadour hailed the return 
of spring; but with him it- was a pieoe of empty ritual 
ism, Chauoer took a true delight in the new green of 

the leaves and the return of singing birds, — a delight 

as simple as thai of Robin Hood : 

M in summer when the shaws i»«- sheen, 
And leaves be large and '<><% 
It, is full merry In fall foresl 
To bear the small birds 1 song." 

Ho has never so nineh as heard of* t he " hurt hen and tho 

mystery of all this unintelligible world." His flowers 

and trees and birds have never bothered themselves 

with Spinoza. He himself sings more like a bird than 

:in\ other poet, because it never oeenrred to him, as to 

Goethe, thai he ought to do so. He pours himself out 

in sincere jov and I hankfnlness. When we compare S|>en 
Ber's imitations of him with the original passages, we feel 
thai the delight Of the later poet was more in the 63 
pression than in the I Inn:- itself. Nature with him is onl\ 

good to be transfigured by art. We walk among Chau 



CHAUCER. 

oer's sights and sounds j we listen bo Spenser's tnusioal 
reproduction of them, In the same way, the pleasure 
ulncli Chauoer takes in telling his stories has In itself 
the effect of consummate skill) and makes >ih follow all 
the windings of liiK fanoy with sympathetic interest His 
I test tales run on like one of our inland rivers, sometimes 
hastening a little and turning upon themselves in eddies 

that dimple without retarding the ourrenl ; Bomet is 

Loitering Bmoothly, while here and there ;• quiet thought, 
;i tender feeling, a pleasant image, golden hearted pei 
o|iciiM quiol ly as a water lily, i<> float on the surface with 
out breaking it into ripple The vulgar intellectual pal 
ate hankers after the titillation of foaming phrase, and 
thinks nothing good for muoh that does not go off with a 
pop like a ohampagne oork. The mellow, suavitj of more 
precious vintages Beems insipid i but the taste, in pro 
portion as i'< refines, learns to appreciate the indefinable 
flavor, too subtile for analysis. A manner has prevailed 
of late in whioh every other word seems to !»<■ under 
scored us in a school girl's letter. The poet seems intent 
on showing his sinew, as if the power of the Blira A.pollo 
lay in the girth of his bioeps. Force for the mere sake 
of force ends like Milo, caught and held mockingly fast 
l>y the reooilof the log he undertook to rive, in the race 
of fame, there are a score oapable of brilliant tpurti for 
one who oomes in winner after a steady pull with wind 
and muscle to spare. Chaucer never show;, anj signs of 
effort, and it is a main proof of his excellence that he can 
be go inadequately Bampled by detached passages, by 
single lines taken away from the connection In whioh 
they contribute to the general effect. ll«- has that con 
tinuity of thought, that evenly prolonged powor, and that 
delightful equanimity, which characterize the higher 
orders of mind. There is something in him of the disin 
terestednesa that made the Greoks masters in art. His 



282 CHAUCER. 

phrase is never importunate. His simplicity is that of 
elegance, not of poverty. The quiet unconcern with 
which he says his best things is peculiar to him among 
English poets, though Goldsmith, Addison, and Thack- 
eray have approached it in prose. He prattles inad- 
vertently away, and all the while, like the princess in the 
story, lets fall a pearl at every other word. It is such a 
piece of good luck to be natural ! It is the good gift 
which the fairy godmother brings to her prime favorites 
in the cradle. If not genius, it is alone what makes 
genius amiable in the arts. If a man have it not, he will 
never find it, for when it is sought it is gone. 

When Chaucer describes anything, it is commonly by 
one of those simple and obvious epithets or qualities that 
are so easy to miss. Is it a woman 1 He tells us she 
is fresh; that she has glad eyes ; that " every day her 
beauty newed " ; that 

" Methought all fellowship as naked 
Withouten her that I saw once, 
As a corone without the stones." 

Sometimes he describes amply by the merest hint, as 
where the Friar, before setting himself softly down, 
drives away the cat. We know without need of more 
words that he has chosen the snuggest corner. In some 
of his early poems he sometimes, it is true, falls into the 
catalogue style of his contemporaries ; but after he had 
found his genius he never particularizes too much, — a 
process as deadly to all effect as an explanation to a pun. 
The first stanza of the " Clerk's Tale " gives us a land- 
scape whose stately choice of objects shows a skill in 
composition worthy of Claude, the last artist who painted 
nature epically : — 

" There is at the west ende of Itaile, 
Down at the foot of Vesulus the cold, 
A lusty plain abundant of vitaile, 



CHAUCEK. 283 

Where many a tower and town thou may'st behold 
That founded were in time of fathers old, 
And many another dehtable sight : 
And Saluces this noble country hight/' 

The Pre-Raphaelite style of landscape entangles the eye 
among the obtrusive weeds and grass-blades of the fore- 
ground which, in looking at a real bit of scenery, we 
overlook ; but what a sweep of vision is here ! and what 
happy generalization in the sixth verse as the poet turns 
away to the business of his story ! The whole is full of 
open air. 

But it is in his characters, especially, that his manner 
is large and free ; for he is painting history, though with 
the fidelity of portrait. He brings out strongly the 
essential traits, characteristic of the genus rather than 
of the individual. The Merchant who keeps so steady a 
countenance that 

" There wist no wight that he was e'er in debt," 

the Sergeant at Law, " who seemed busier than he was," 
the Doctor of Medicine, whose " study was but little on 
the Bible," — in all these cases it is the type and not the 
personage that fixes his attention. William Blake says 
truly, though he expresses his meaning somewhat clum- 
sily, " the characters of Chaucer's Pilgrims are the char- 
acters which compose all ages and nations. Some of the 
names and titles are altered by time, but the characters 
remain forever unaltered, and consequently they are the 
physiognomies and lineaments of universal human life, 
beyond which Nature never steps. Names alter, things 
never alter. As Newton numbered the stars, and as 
Linnaeus numbered the plants, so Chaucer numbered the 
classes of men." In his outside accessaries, it is true, he 
sometimes seems as minute as if he were illuminating a 
missal. Nothing escapes his sure eye for the picturesque, 
— the cut of the beard, the soil of armor on the buff 



284 CHAUCER. 

jerkin, the rust on the sword, the expression of the eye. 
But in this he has an artistic purpose. It is here that 
he individualizes, and, while every touch harmonizes 
with and seems to complete the moral features of the 
character, makes us feel that we are among living men, 
and not the abstracted images of men. Crabbe adds 
particular to particular, scattering rather than deepening 
the impression of reality, and making us feel as if every 
man were a species by himself; but Chaucer, never for- 
getting the essential sameness of human nature, makes 
it possible, and even probable, that his motley characters 
should meet on a common footing, while he gives to 
each the expression that belongs to him, the result of 
special circumstance or training. Indeed, the absence of 
any suggestion of caste cannot fail to strike any reader 
familiar with the literature on which he is supposed 
to have formed himself. No characters are at once so 
broadly human and so definitely outlined as his. Belong- 
ing, some of them, to extinct types, they continue con- 
temporary and familiar forever. So wide is the difference 
between knowing a great many men and that knowledge 
of human nature which comes of sympathetic insight and 
not of observation alone. 

It is this power of sympathy which makes Chaucer's 
satire .so kindly, — more so, one is tempted to say, than 
the panegyric of Pope. Intellectual satire gets its force 
from personal or 'moral antipathy, and measures offences 
by some rigid conventional standard. Its mouth waters 
over a galling word, and it loves to say Thou, pointing 
out its victim to public scorn. Indignatio facit versiis, 
it boasts, though they might as often be fathered on 
envy or hatred. But imaginative satire, warmed through 
and through with the genial leaven of humor, smiles 
half sadly and murmurs We. Chaucer either makes one 
knave betray another, through a natural jealousy of 



CHAUCEE. 285 

competition, or else expose himself with a naivete of 
good-humored cynicism which amuses rather than dis- 
gusts. In the former case the butt has a kind of claim 
on our sympathy • in the latter, it seems nothing strange 
if the sunny atmosphere which floods that road to Can- 
terbury should tempt anybody to throw off one disguise 
after another without suspicion. With perfect tact, too, 
the Host is made the choragus in this diverse company, 
and the coarse jollity of his temperament explains, if it 
does not excuse, much that would otherwise seem out of 
keeping. Surely nobody need have any scruples with 
him. 

Chaucer seems to me to have been one of the most 
purely original of poets, as much so in respect of the 
w r orld that is about us as Dante in respect of that which 
is within us. There had been nothing like him before, 
there has been nothing since. He is original, not in the 
sense that he thinks and says what nobody ever thought 
and said before, and what nobody can ever think and 
say again, but because he is always natural, because, 
if not always absolutely new, he is always delightfully 
fresh, because he sets before us the world as it honestly 
appeared to Geoffrey Chaucer, and not a world as it 
seemed proper to certain people that it ought to appear. 
He found that the poetry which had preceded him had 
been first the expression of individual feeling, then of 
class feeling as the vehicle of legend and history, and 
at last had wellnigh lost itself in chasing the mirage of 
allegory. Literature seemed to have passed through 
the natural stages which at regular intervals bring it to 
decline. Even the lyrics of the jongleurs were all run 
in one mould, and the Pastourelles of Northern France 
had become as artificial as the Pastorals of Pope. The 
Romances of chivalry had been made over into prcse, 
and the Melusine of his contemporary Jehan d'Arras is 



286 CHAUCER. 

the forlorn hope of the modern novel. Arrived thus far 
in their decrepitude, the monks endeavored to give them 
a religious and moral turn by allegorizing them. Their 
process reminds one of something Ulloa tells us of the 
fashion in which the Spaniards converted the Mexicans : 
" Here we found an old man in a cavern so extremely 
aged as it was wonderful, which could neither see nor 
go because he was so lame and crooked. The Father, 
Friar Raimund, said it were good (seeing he was so 
aged) to make him a Christian ; whereupon we baptized 
him." The monks found the Romances in the same 
stage of senility, and gave them a saving sprinkle with 
the holy water of allegory. Perhaps they were only 
trying to turn the enemy's own weapons against him- 
self, for it was the free-thinking " Romance of the Rose " 
that more than anything else had made allegory fashion- 
able. Plutarch tells us that an allegory is to say one 
thing where another is meant, and this might have been 
needful for the personal security of Jean de Meung, as 
afterwards for that of his successor, Rabelais. But, 
except as a means of evading the fagot, the method has 
few recommendations. It reverses the true office of 
poetry by making the real unreal. It is imagination 
endeavoring to recommend itself to the understanding 
by means of cuts. If an author be in such deadly 
earnest, or if his imagination be of such creative vigor 
as to project real figures when it meant to cast only a 
shadow iipon vapor ; if the true spirit come, at once 
obsequious and terrible, when the conjurer has drawn 
his circle and gone through with his incantations merely 
to produce a proper frame of mind in his audience, as 
was the case with Dante, there is no longer any ques- 
tion of allegory as the word and thing are commonly 
understood. But with all secondary poets, as with 
Spenser for example, the allegory does not become of 



CHAUCER. 28? 

one substance with the poetry, but is a kind of carven 
frame for it, whose figures lose their meaning, as they 
cease to be contemporary. It was not a style, that could 
have much attraction for a nature so sensitive to the 
actual, so observant of it, so interested by it as that of 
Chaucer. He seems to have tried his hand at all the 
forms in vogue, and to have arrived in his old age at the 
truth, essential to all really great poetry, that his own 
instincts were his safest guides, that there is nothing 
deeper in life than life itself, and that to conjure an 
allegorical significance into it was to lose sight of its 
real meaning. He of all men could not say one thing 
and mean another, unless by way of humorous contrast. 

In thus turning frankly and gayly to the actual world, 
and drinking inspiration from sources open to all ; in 
turning away from a colorless abstraction to the solid 
earth and to emotions common to every pulse ; in dis- 
covering that to make the best of nature, and not to 
grope vaguely after something better than nature, was 
the true office of Art ; in insisting on a definite purpose, 
on veracity, cheerfulness, and simplicity, Chaucer shows 
himself the true father and founder of what is character- 
istically English literature. He has a hatred of cant as 
hearty as Dr. Johnson's, though he has a slier way of 
showing it ; he has the placid common-sense of Franklin, 
the sweet, grave humor of Addison, the exquisite tasto 
of Gray ; but the whole texture of his mind, though its 
substance seem plain and grave, shows itself at every 
turn iridescent with poetic feeling like shot silk. Above 
all, he has an eye for character that seems to have caught 
at once not only its mental and physical features, but 
even its expression in variety of costume, — an eye, in- 
deed, second only, if it should be called second in some 
respects, to that of Shakespeare. 

I know of nothing that may be compared with the 



288 CHAUCER. 

prologue to the "Canterbury Tales," and with that to the 
story of the " Chanon's Yeoman" before Chaucer. Char- 
acters and portraits from real life had never been drawn 
with such discrimination, or with such variety, never 
with such bold precision of outline, and with such a 
lively sense of the picturesque. His Parson is still un- 
matched, though Dryden and Goldsmith have both tried 
their hands in emulation of him. And the humor also 
in its suavity, its perpetual presence and its shy unob- 
trusiveness, is something wholly new in literature. For 
anything that deserves to be called like it in English we 
must w r ait for Henry Fielding. 

Chaucer is the first great poet who has treated To-day 
as if it were as good as Yesterday, the first who held up 
a mirror to contemporary life in its infinite variety of 
high and low, of humor and pathos. But he reflected 
life in its large sense as the life of men, from the knight 
to the ploughman, — the life of every day as it is made 
up of that curious compound of human nature with 
manners. The very form of the " Canterbury Tales " was 
imaginative. The garden of Boccaccio, the supper-party 
of Grazzini, and the voyage of Giraldi make a good enough 
thread for their stories, but exclude all save equals and 
friends, exclude consequently human nature in its wider 
meaning. But by choosing a pilgrimage, Chaucer puts 
us on a plane where all men are equal, with souls to be 
saved, and with another world in view that abolishes all 
distinctions. By this choice, and by making the Host 
of the Tabard always the central figure, he has happily 
united the two most familiar emblems of life, — the 
short journey and the inn. We find more and more as 
we study him that he rises quietly from the conventional 
to the universal, and may fairly take his place with 
Homer in virtue of the breadth of his humanity. 

In spite of some external stains, which those who 



CHAUCER. 289 

have studied the influence of manners will easily account 
for without imputing them to any moral depravity, we 
feel that we can join the pure-minded Spenser in calling 
him "most sacred, happy spirit." If character may be 
divined from works, he was a good man, genial, sincere, 
hearty, temperate of mind, more wise, perhaps, for this 
world than the next, but thoroughly humane, and friend- 
ly with God and men. I know not how to sum up what 
we feel about him better than by saying (what would 
have pleased most one who was indifferent to fame) that 
we love him more even than we admire. We are sure 
that here was a true brother-man so kindly that, in his 
" House of Fame," after naming the great poets, he 
throws in a pleasant word for the oaten-pipes 

" Of the little herd-grooms 
That keepen beasts among the brooms." 

No better inscription can be written on the first page of 
his works than that which he places over the gate in 
his " Assembly of Fowls," and which contrasts so sweetly 
with the stern lines of Dante from which they were 
imitated : — 

" Through me men go into the blissful place 
Of the heart's heal and deadly woundes' cure; 
Through me men go unto the well of Grace, 
Where green and lusty May doth ever endure; 
This is the way to all good a venture ; 
Be glad, thou Reader, and thy sorrow offcast, 
All open am I, pass in, and speed thee fast! " 



13 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS.* 



MANY of our older readers can remember the an- 
ticipation with which they looked for each suc- 
cessive volume of the late Dr. Young's excellent series 
of old English prose-writers, and the delight with which 
they carried it home, fresh from the press and the bind- 
ery in its appropriate livery of evergreen. To most of 
us it was our first introduction to the highest society 
of letters, and we still feel grateful to the departed 
scholar who gave us to share the conversation of such 
men as Latimer, More, Sidney, Taylor, Browne, Fuller, 
and Walton. What a sense of security in an old book 
which Time has criticised for us ! What a precious feel- 
ing of seclusion in having a double wall of centuries 
between us and the heats and clamors of contemporary 
literature ! How limpid seems the thought, how pure 
the old wine of scholarship that has been settling for so 
many generations in those silent crypts and Falernian 
amjohorce of the Past ! No other writers speak to us 
with the authority of those whose ordinary speeeh was 
that of our translation of the Scriptures ; to no modern 
is that frank unconsciousness possible which was natural 
to a period when yet reviews were not ; and no later 
style breathes that country charm characteristic of days 
ere the metropolis had drawn all literary activity to it- 
self, and the trampling feet of the mulc'Tude had banished 
the lark and the daisy from the fresh privacies of lan- 

* London : John Eussell Smith. 1856 - G4. 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 291 

guage. Truly, as compared with the present, these old 
voices seem to come from the morning fields and not the 
paved thoroughfares of thought. 

Even the " Retrospective Review " continues to be 
good reading, in virtue of the antique aroma (for wine 
only acquires its bouquet by age) which pervades its pages. 
Its sixteen volumes are so many tickets of admission to 
the vast and devious vaults of the sixteenth and seven- 
teenth centuries, through which we wander, tasting a 
thimbleful of rich Canary, honeyed Cyprus, or subacidu- 
lous Hock, from what dusty butt or keg our fancy 
chooses. The years during which this review was pub- 
lished were altogether the most fruitful in genuine ap- 
preciation of old English literature. Books were prized 
for their imaginative and not their antiquarian value 
by young writers who sate at the feet of Lamb and Cole- 
ridge. Rarities of style, of thought, of fancy, were 
sought, rather than the barren scarcities of typography. 
But another race of men seems to have sprung up, in 
whom the futile enthusiasm of the collector predomi- 
nates, who substitute archseologic perversity for fine- 
nerved scholarship, and the worthless profusion of the 
curiosity-shop for the sifted exclusiveness of the cabinet 
of Art. They forget, in their fanaticism for antiquity, that 
the dust of never so many centuries is impotent to trans- 
form a curiosity into a gem, that only good books absorb 
mellowness of tone from age, and that a baptismal register 
which proves a patriarchal longevity (if existence be life) 
cannot make mediocrity anything but a bore, or garrulous 
commonplace entertaining. There are volumes which 
have the old age of Plato, rich with gathering expe- 
rience, meditation, and wisdom, which seem to have 
sucked color and ripeness from the genial autumns of all 
the select intelligences that have steeped them in the 
sunshine of their love and appreciation ; — these quaint 



292 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

freaks of russet tell of Montaigne ; these stripes of 
crimson fire, of Shakespeare ; this sober gold, of Sir 
Thomas Browne ; this purpling bloom, of Lamb ; in 
such fruits we taste the legendary gardens of Alcinotis 
and the orchards of Atlas ; and there are volumes again 
which can claim only the inglorious senility of Old Parr 
or older Jenkins, which have outlived their half-dozen of 
kings to be the prize of showmen and treasuries of the 
born-to-be-forgotten trifles of a hundred years ago. 

We confess a bibliothecarian avarice that gives all 
books a value in our eyes ; there is for us a recondite 
wisdom in the phrase, " A book is a book " ; from the 
time when we made the first catalogue of our library, 
in which "Bible, large, 1 vol.," and "Bible, small, 1 vol.," 
asserted their alphabetic individuality and were the sole 
i?s in our little hive, we have had a weakness even for 
those checker-board volumes that only fill up ; we can- 
not breathe the thin air of that Pepysian self-denial, 
that Himalayan selectness, which, content with one book- 
case, would have no tomes in it but 2>orphyrogeniti, books 
of the bluest blood, making room for choicer new-comers 
by a continuous ostracism to the garret of present in- 
cumbents. There is to us a sacredness in a volume, 
however dull; we live over again the author's lonely 
labors and tremulous hopes ; we see him, on his first 
appearance after parturition, " as well as could be ex- 
pected," a nervous sympathy yet surviving between the 
late-severed umbilical cord and the wondrous offspring, 
doubtfully entering the Mermaid, or the Devil Tavern, 
or the Coffee-house of Will or Button, blushing under 
the eye of Ben or Dryden or Addison, as if they must 
needs know him for the author of the " Modest Enquiry 
into the Present State of Dramatique Poetry," or of the 
" Unities briefly considered by Philomusus," of which 
they have never heard and never will hear so much as 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 293 

the names ; we see the country-gentlemen (sole cause of 
its surviving to our day) who buy it as a book no gen- 
tleman's library can be complete without j we see the 
spendthrift heir, whose horses and hounds and Pharaonic 
troops of friends, drowned in a Red Sea of claret, bring 
it to the hammer, the tall octavo in tree-calf following 
the ancestral oaks of the park. Such a volume is sacred 
to us. But it must be the original foundling of the 
book-stall, the engraved blazon of some extinct baron- 
etcy within its cover, its leaves enshrining memorial- 
flowers of some passion which the churchyard smothered 
ere the Stuarts were yet discrowned, suggestive of the 
trail of laced ruffles, burnt here and there with ashes 
from the pipe of some dozing poet, its binding worn 
and weather-stained, that has felt the inquisitive finger, 
perhaps, of Malone, or thrilled to the touch of Lamb, 
doubtful between desire and the odd sixpence. When 
it comes to a question of reprinting, we are more choice. 
The new duodecimo is bald and bare, indeed, compared 
with its battered prototype that could draw us wdth a 
single hair of association. 

It is not easy to divine the rule which has governed 
Mr. Smith in making the selections for his series. A 
choice of old authors should be a florilegium, and not a 
botanist's hortus siccus, to which grasses are as important 
as the single shy blossom of a summer. The old-maid- 
enly genius of antiquarianism seems to have presided 
over the editing of the " Library." We should be in- 
clined to surmise that the works to be reprinted had 
been commonly suggested by gentlemen with whom they 
were especial favorites, or who were ambitious that their 
own names should be signalized on the title-pages with 
the suffix of Editor. The volumes already published 
are : Increase Mather's " Remarkable Providences " ; 
the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden j the " Vis> 



294 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

ions of Piers Ploughman ; " the works in prose and 
verse of Sir Thomas Overbury ; the " Hymns and Songs" 
and the " Hallelujah " of George Wither ; the poems of 
Southwell; Seidell's "Table-Talk"; the "Enchiridion" 
of Quarles ; the dramatic works of Marston, Webster, and 
Lilly ; Chapman's translation of Homer ; Lovelace, and 
four volumes of "Early English Poetry"! The vol- 
ume of Mather is curious and entertaining, and fit to 
stand on the same shelf with the " Magnalia " of his book- 
suffocated son. Cunningham's comparatively recent 
edition, we should think, might satisfy for a long time 
to come the demand for Drummond, whose chief value 
to posterity is as the Boswell of Ben Jonson. Sir 
Thomas Overbury's " Characters " are interesting illus- 
trations of contemporary manners, and a mine of foot- 
notes to the works of better men, — but, with the ex- 
ception of " The Fair and Happy Milkmaid," they are 
dull enough to have pleased James the First; his 
" Wife " is a cento of far-fetched conceits, — here a tom- 
tit, and there a hen mistaken for a pheasant, like the 
contents of a cockney's game-bag, and his chief interest 
for us lies in his having been mixed up with an inexpli- 
cable tragedy and poisoned in the Tower, not without 
suspicion of royal complicity. The "Piers Ploughman " 
is a reprint, with very little improvement that we can 
discover, of Mr. Wright's former edition. It would have 
been very well to have republished the " Fair Virtue," 
and "Shepherd's Hunting " of George Wither, which 
contain all the true poetry he ever w T rote ; but we can 
imagine nothing more dreary than the seven hundred 
pages of his " Hymns and Songs," whose only use, that 
we can conceive of, would be as penal reading for incor- 
rigible poetasters. If a steady course of these did not 
bring them out of their nonsenses, nothing short of 
hanging would. Take this as a sample, hit on by open- 
ing at random : — 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 295 

u Rottenness my bones possest^ 
Trembling fear possessed me; 
I that troublous day might rest: 
For, when his approaches be 
Onward to the people made, 
His strong troops will them invade." 

Southwell is, if possible, worse. He paraphrases Da- 
vid, putting into his mouth such punning conceits as 
"fears are my feres," and in his "Saint Peter's Com- 
plaint " makes that rashest and shortest-spoken of the 
Apostles drawl through thirty pages of maudlin repent- 
ance, in which the distinctions between the north and 
northeast sides of a sentimentality are worthy of Duns 
Scot us. It does not follow, that, because a man is hanged 
for his faith, he is able to write ^ood verses. We would 
almost match the fortitude that quails not at the good 
Jesuit's poems with his own which carried him serenely 
to the fatal tree. The stuff of which poets are made, 
whether finer or not, is of a very different fibre from that 
wdiich is used in the tough fabric of martyrs. It is 
time that an earnest protest should be uttered against 
the wrong done to the religious sentiment by the greater 
part of what is called religious poetry, and which is com- 
monly a painful something misnamed by the noun and 
misqualified by the adjective. To dilute David, and 
make doggerel of that majestic prose of the Prophets 
which has the glow and wide-orbited metre of constel- 
lations, may be a useful occupation to keep country-gen- 
tlemen out of litigation or retired clergymen from polem- 
ics ; but to regard these metrical mechanics as sacred 
because nobody wishes to touch them, as meritorious 
because no one can be merry in their company, — to 
rank them in the same class with those ancient songs of 
the Church, sweet with the breath of saints, sparkling 
with the tears of forgiven penitents, and warm with the 
fervor of martyrs, — nay, to set them up beside such 



296 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

poems as those of Herbert, composed in the upper 
chambers of the soul that open toward the sun's rising, 
is to confound piety with dulness, and the manna of 
heaven with its sickening namesake from the apoth- 
ecary's drawer. The " Enchiridion " of Quarles is hardly 
worthy of the author of the " Emblems," and is by no 
means an unattainable book in other editions, — nor a 
matter of heartbreak, if- it were. Of the dramatic works 
of Marston and Lilly it is enough to say that they are 
truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, 
nor, as literature, worth the paper they blot. They 
seem to have been deemed worthy of republication be- 
cause they were the contemporaries of true poets ; and 
if all the Tuppers of the nineteenth century will buy 
their plays on the same principle, the sale will be a 
remunerative one. It was worth while, perhaps, to re- 
print Lovelace, if only to show what dull verses may be 
written by a man who has made one lucky hit. Of the 
" Early English Poetry," nine tenths had better never 
have been printed at all, and the other tenth reprinted 
by an editor who had some vague suspicion, at least, of 
what they meant. The Homer of Chapman is so pre- 
cious a gift, that we are ready to forgive all Mr. Smith's 
shortcomings in consideration of it. It is a vast placer, 
full of nuggets for the philologist and the lover of poetry. 
Having now run cursorily through the series of Mr. 
Smith's reprints, we come to the closer question of 
How are they edited ? Whatever the merit of the original 
works, the editors, whether self-elected or chosen by the 
publisher, should be accurate and scholarly. The edit- 
ing of the Homer we can heartily commend ; and Dr. 
Kimbault, who carried the works of Overbury through 
the press, has done his work well ; but the other vol- 
umes of the Library are very creditable neither to Eng- 
lish scholarship nor to English typography. The Intro- 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 297 

ductions to some of them are enough to make us think 
that we are fallen to the necessity of reprinting our old 
authors because the art of writing correct and graceful 
English has been lost. William B. Turnbull, Esq., of 
Lincoln's Inn, Barrister at Law, says, for instance, in his 
Introduction to Southwell : " There was resident at 
Uxendon, near Harrow on the Hill, in Middlesex, a 
Catholic family of the name of Bellamy whom [which] 
Southwell was in the habit of visiting and providing 
with religious instruction when he exchanged his ordi- 
nary [ordinarily] close confinement for a purer atmos- 
phere." (p. xxii.) Again, (p. xxii,) " He had, in this 
manner, for six years, pursued, with very great success, 
the objects of his mission, when these were abruptly 
terminated by his foul betrayal into the hands of his 
enemies in 1592." We should like to have Mr. Turn- 
bull explain how the objects of a mission could be termi- 
nated by a betrayal, however it might be with the mis- 
sion itself. From the many similar flowers in the In- 
troduction to Mather's " Providences," by Mr. George 
Offor, (in whom, we fear, we recognize a countryman,) 
we select the following : " It was at this period when, 
[that,] oppressed by the ruthless hand of persecu- 
tion, our Pilgrim Fathers, threatened with torture and 
death, succumbed not to man, but trusting on [in] an 
almighty arm, braved the dangers of an almost un- 
known ocean, and threw themselves into the arms of 
men called savages, who proved more beneficent than 
national Christians." To whom or wdiat our Pilgrim 
Fathers did succumb, and what " national Christians " 
are, we leave, with the song of the Sirens, to conjecture. 
Speaidng of the "Providences," Mr. Offor says, that 
"they faithfully delineate the state of public opinion 
two hundred years ago, the most striking feature being 
an implicit faith in the' power of the [in-]visible world to 
13* 



298 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

hold visible intercourse with man : — not the angels to 
bless poor erring mortals, but of demons imparting 
power to witches and warlocks to injure, terrify and de- 
stroy," — a sentence which we defy any witch or war- 
lock, though he were Michael Scott himself, to parse 
with the astutest demonic aid. On another page, he 
says of Dr. Mather, that " he was one of the first divines 
who discovered that very many strange events, which 
were considered preternatural, had occurred in the 
course of nature or by deceitful juggling ; that the 
Devil could not speak English, nor prevail with Protes- 
tants ; the smell of herbs alarms the Devil ; that medi- 
cine drives out Satan ! " We do not wonder that Mr. 
Oifor put a mark of exclamation at the end of this sur- 
prising sentence, but we do confess our astonishment 
that the vermilion pencil of the proof-reader differed it 
to pass unchallenged. Leaving its bad English out of 
the question, we find, on referring to Mather's text, that 
he was never guilty of the absurdity of believing that 
Satan was less eloquent in English than in any other 
language ; that it was the British (Welsh) tongue which 
a certain demon whose education had been neglected 
(not the Devil) could not speak ; that Mather is not fool 
enough to say that the Fiend cannot prevail with Prot- 
estants, nor that the smell of herbs alarms him, nor 
that medicine drives him out. Anything more help- 
lessly inadequate than Mr. Offor's preliminary disser- 
tation on Witchcraft we never read ; but we could 
hardly expect much from an editor whose citations from 
the book he is editing show that he had either not read 
or not understood it. 

Mr. Offor is superbly Protestant and iconoclastic, — 
not sparing, as we have seen, even Priscian's head 
among the rest ; but, en revanche., Mr. Turnbull is ultra- 
montane beyond the editors of the Civilta Cattolioa. 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 239 

He allows himself to say, that, " after Southwell's death, 
one of his sisters, a Catholic in heart, but timidly and 
blamably simulating heresy, wrought, with some relics 
of the martyr, several cures on persons afflicted with 
desperate and deadly diseases, which had baffled the 
skill of all physicians." Mr. Turnbull is, we suspect, a 
recent convert, or it would occur to him that doctors 
are still secure of a lucrative practice in countries full 
of the relics of greater saints than even Southwell. 
That father was hanged (according to Protestants) for 
treason, and the relic which put the whole pharmaco- 
poeia to shame was, if we mistake not, his neckerchief. 
But whatever the merits of the Jesuit himself, and how- 
ever it may gratify Mr. Turnbull's catechumenical en- 
thusiasm to exalt the curative properties of this integu- 
ment of his, even at the expense of Jesuits' bark, we 
cannot but think that he has shown a credulity that 
unfits him for writing a fair narrative of his hero's life, 
or making a tolerably just estimate of his verses. It is 
possible, however, that these last seem prosaic as a 
necktie only to heretical readers. 

We have singled out the Introductions of Messrs. 
Turnbull and OfFor for special animadversion because 
they are on the whole the worst, both of them being 
offensively sectarian, while that of Mr. Offor in particular 
gives us almost no information whatever. Some of the 
others are not without grave faults, chief among which 
is a vague declamation, especially out of place in criti- 
cal essays, where it serves only to weary the reader and 
awaken his distrust. In his Introduction to Wither's 
" Hallelujah," for instance, Mr. Farr informs us that 
" nearly all the best poets of the latter half of the six- 
teenth century — for that w T as the period when the 
Reformation was fully established — and the whole of the 
seventeenth century were sacred poets," and that " even 



300 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Shakespeare and the contemporary dramatists of his 
age sometimes attuned their well-strung harps to the 
songs of Zion." Comment on statements like these 
would be as useless us the assertions themselves are 
absurd. 

We have quoted these examples only to justify us in 
saying that Mr. Smith must select his editors with 
more care if he wishes that his " Library of Old 
A ui hors " should deserve the confidence and thereby gain 
the good word of intelligent readers, — without which 
such a series can neither win oor keep the patronage of 
the public. It is impossible that men who cannot con- 
struct an English sentence correctly, and who do not 
know the value of clearness in writing, should be able 
to disentangle the knots which slovenly printers have 
tied in the thread of an old author's meaning; and it is 
more than doubtful whether they who assert carelessly, 
cite inaccurately, and write loosely are not by nature 
disqualified for doing thoroughly what they undertake 
to do. If it were unreasonable to demand of every one 
who assumes to edit one of our early poets the critical 
acumen, the genial sense, the illimitable reading, the 
philological scholarship, which in combination would 
alone make the ideal editor, it is not presumptuous to 
expect some one of these qualifications singly, and we 
have the right to insist upon patience and accuracy, 
which are within the reach of every one, and without 
which all the others are wellnigb vain. Now to this 
virtue of accuracy Mr. Otfor specifically lays claim in 
• me <>f his remarkable sentences : " We are bound to ad- 
mire," he says, " the accuracy and beauty of this speci- 
men of typography. Following in the path of my late 
friend William Pickering, our publisher rivals the 
Aldine and Elzevir presses, which have been so univer- 
sally admired." We should think that it was the pro- 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 301 

duct of those presses which had been admired, and that 
Mr. Smith presents a still worthier object of admiration 
when he contrives to follow a path and rival a press at 
the same time. But let that pass ; — it is the claim to 
accuracy which we dispute ; and we deliberately affirm, 
that, so far as we are able to judge by the volumes we 
have examined, no claim more unfounded was ever set 
up. In some cases, as we shall show presently, the 
blunders of the original work have been followed with 
painful accuracy in the reprint; but many others have 
been added by the carelessness of Mr. Smith's printers 
or editors. In the thirteen pages of Mr. Offer's own In- 
troduction we have found as many as seven typographi- 
cal errors, — unless some of them are to be excused on 
the ground that Mr. Offer's studies have not yet led him 
into those arcana where we are taught such recondite mys- 
teries of language as that verbs agree with their nomi- 
natives. In Mr. Fair's Introduction to the " Hymns 
and Songs" nine short extracts from other poems of 
Wither are quoted, and in these we have found no less 
than seven misprints or false readings which materially 
affect the sense. Textual inaccuracy is a grave fault in 
the new edition of an old poet ; and Mr. Farr is not 
only liable to this charge, but also to that of making 
blundering misstatements which .are calculated to mis- 
lead the careless or uncritical reader. Infected by the 
absurd cant which has been prevalent for the last dozen 
years among literary sciolists, he says, — "The language 
used by Wither in all his various works — whether 
secular or sacred — is pure Saxon." Taken literally, 
this assertion is manifestly ridiculous, and, allowing it 
every possible limitation, it is not only untrue of With- 
er, but. of every English poet, from Chaucer down. The 
translators of our Bible made use of the German version, 
and a poet versifying the English Scriptures would 



302 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

therefore be likely to use more words of Teutonic origin 
than in his original compositions. But no English poet 
can write English poetry except in English, — that is, in 
that compound of Teutonic and Romanic which derives 
its heartiness and strength from the one and its canor- 
ous elegance from the other. The Saxon language does 
not sing, and, though its tough mortar serve to hold to- 
gether the less compact Latin words, porous with vowels, 
it is to the Latin that our verse owes majesty, harmony, 
variety, and the capacity for rhyme. A quotation of six 
lines from Wither ends at the top of the very page on 
which Mr. Fair lays down his extraordinary dictum, and 
we will let this answer him, Italicizing the words of 
Iiomance derivation : — 

" Her true beauty leaves behind 
Apprehensions in the mind, 
Of more sweetness than all art 
Or inventions can impart ; 
Thoughts too deep to be expressed, 
And too strong to be suppressed.''' 

Mr. Halliwell, at the close of his Preface to the Works 
of Marston, (Vol. I. p. xxii,) says, "The dramas now 
collected together are reprinted absolutely from the 
early editions, which were placed in the hands of our 
printers, who thus had the advantage of following them 
without the intervention of a transcriber. They are 
given as nearly as possible in their original state, the 
only modernizations attempted consisting in the alterna- 
tions of the letters i and /, and u and v, the retention of 
which " (does Mr. Halliwell mean the letters or the " al- 
ternations " 1) " would have answered no useful purpose, 
while it would have unnecessarily perplexed the modern 
reader." 

This is not very clear ; but as Mr. Halliwell is a mem- 
ber of several learned foreign societies, and especially of 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 303 

the Royal Irish Academy, perhaps it would be unfair to 
demand that he should write clear English. As one of 
Mr. Smith's editors, it was to be expected that he should 
not write it idiomatically. Some malign constellation 
(Taurus, perhaps, whose infaust aspect may be supposed 
to preside over the makers of bulls and blunders) seems 
to have been in conjunction with heavy Saturn when the 
Library was projected. At the top of the same page 
from which we have made our quotation, Mr. Halliwell 
speaks of " conveying a favorable impression on modern 
readers." It w r as surely to no such phrase as this that 
Ensign Pistol alluded when he said, " Convey the wise it 
call." 

A literal reprint of an old author may be of value in 
two ways : the orthography may in certain cases indicate 
the ancient pronunciation, or it may put us on a scent 
which shall lead us to the burrow of a word among the 
roots of language. But in order to this, it surely is not 
needful to undertake the reproduction of all the original 
errors of the press ; and even were it so, the proofs of 
carelessness in the editorial department are so glaring, 
that we are left in doubt, after all, if we may congratu- 
late ourselves on possessing all these sacred blunders of 
the Elizabethan type-setters in their integrity, and with- 
out any debasement of modern alloy. If it be gratifying 
to know that there lived stupid men before our contem- 
porary Agamemnons in that kind, yet we demand abso- 
lute accuracy in the report of the phenomena in order to 
arrive at anything like safe statistics. For instance, we 
find (Vol. I. p. 89) " Actus Secundus, Scena Primus," 
and (Vol. III. p. 174) " -exit ambo" and we are interested 
to know that in a London printing-house, two centuries 
and a half ago, there was a philanthropist who wished 
to simplify the study of the Latin language by reducing 
all the nouns to one gender and all the verbs to one 



304 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

number. Had his emancipated theories of grammar pre- 
vailed, how much easier would that part of boys which 
cherubs want have found the school-room benches ! 
How would birchen bark, as an educational tonic, have 
fallen in repute ! How white would have been the (now 
black-and-blue) memories of Dr. Busby and so many 
other educational lictors, who, with their bundles of rods, 
heralded not alone the consuls, but all other Roman an- 
tiquities to us ! We dare not, however, indulge in the 
grateful vision, since there are circumstances which lead 
us to infer that Mr. Halliwell himself (member though 
he be of so many learned societies) has those vague no- 
tions of the speech of ancient Rome which are apt to 
prevail in regions which count not the betida in their 
Flora. On page xv of his Preface, he makes Drummond 
say that Ben Jonson " was dilated" {delated, — Gifford 
gives it in English, accused) " to the king by Sir James 
Murray," — Ben, whose corpulent person stood in so 
little need of that malicious increment ! 

What is Mr. Halli well's conception of editorial duty % 
As we read along, and the once fair complexion of the 
margin grew more and more pitted with pencil-marks, 
like that of a bad proof-sheet, we began to think that he 
was acting on the principle of every man his own wash- 
erwoman, — that he was making blunders of set purpose, 
(as teachers of languages do in their exercises,) in order 
that we might correct them for ourselves, and so fit us 
in time to be editors also, and members of various learned 
societies, even as Mr. Halliwell himself is. We fancied, 
that, magnanimously waving aside the laurel with which 
a grateful posterity crowned General Wade, he wished 
us " to see these roads before they were made," and de- 
velop our intellectual muscles in getting over them. 
But no ; Mr. Halliwell has appended notes to his edi- 
tion, and among them are some which correct misprints, 



LIBEAEY OF OLD AUTHORS. 305 

and therefore seem to imply that he considers that service 
as belonging jDroperly to the editorial function. We are 
obliged, then, to give up our theory that his intention 
was to make every reader an editor, and to suppose that 
he wished rather to show how disgracefully a book might 
be edited and yet receive the commendation of profes- 
sional critics who read with the ends of their fingers. If 
this were his intention, Marston himself never published 
so biting a satire. 

Let us look at a few of the intricate passages, to help 
us through which Mr. Halliwell lends us the light of his 
editorial lantern. In the Induction to " What you Will " 
occurs the striking and unusual phrase, " Now out up- 
pont," and Mr. Halliwell favors *us with the following 
note : " Page 221, line 10. Up-pont. — That is, upon V 
Again in the same play we find — 

" Let t wattling fame cheatd others rest, 
I urn no dish for rumors feast." 

Of course, it should read, — 

" Let twattling [twaddling] Fame cheate others' rest, 
I am no dish for Rumor's feast." 

Mr. Halliwell comes to our assistance thus : " Page 244, 
line 21, [22 it should be,]/ urn, — -a printer's error for 
/ am." Dignus vindice nodus ! Five lines above, we 
have "whole" for "who'll/' and four lines below, "helm- 
eth " for " whelmeth " ; but Mr. Halliwell vouchsafes no 
note. In the " Fawn " we read, " Wise neads use few 
words," and the editor says in a note, "a misprint for 
heads " ! Kind Mr. Halliwell ! 

Having given a few examples of our " Editor's " cor- 
rections, we proceed to quote a passage or two which, it 
is to be presumed, he thought perfectly clear. 

"A man can skarce put on a tuckt-up cap, 
A button'd frizado *iUe, fkarce ente good meate, 
Anchoves, caviare, but hee's satyred 

T 



306 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

And tenn'd phautasticall. By the muddy spawne 

Of slymie neughtes, when troth, phantasticknesse 

That which the natural] sophysters tearme 

Phcmt'usia incompltxa — is a function 

Even of the bright immortal part of man. 

It is the common passe, the sacred dore, 

Unto the prive chamber of the soule; 

That bar'd, nought passeth past the baser court 

Of outward scence by it th' inamorate 

Most lively thinkes he sees the absent beauties 

Of his lov'd mistres." (Vol. I. p. 241.) 

In this case, also, the true readings are clear enough : — 
and 



" And termed fantastical by the muddy spawn 
Of slimy newts " ; 



" . . . . past the baser court 
Of outward sense " ; — 

but, if anything was to be explained, why are we here 
deserted by our fida compagna ? Again, (Vol. II. pp. 
55, 56,) we read, " This Granuffo is a right wise good 
lord, a man of excellent discourse, and never speakes his 
signes to me, and men of profound reach instruct aboun- 
dantly ; hee begges suites with signes, gives thanks with 
signes," etc. This Granuffo is qualified among the " In- 
terlocutors " as " a silent lord," and what fun there is in 
the character (which, it must be confessed, is rather of a 
lenten kind) consists in his genius for saying nothing. 
It is plain enough that the passage should read, "a 
man of excellent discourse, and never speaks ; his 
signs to me and men of profound reach instruct abun- 
dantly," etc. 

In both the passages we have quoted, it is not difficult 
for the reader to set the text right. But if not difficult 
for the reader, it should certainly not have been so for 
the editor, who should have done what Broome was said 
to have done for Pope in his Homer, — " gone before 
and swept the way." An edition of an English author 
ought to be intelligible to English readers, and, if the 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 307 

editor do not make it so, he wrongs the old poet, for two 
centuries lapt in lead, to whose works he undertakes to 
play the gentleman-usher. A play written in our own 
tongue should not be as tough to us as vEschylus to 
a ten years' graduate, nor do we wish to be reduced to 
the level of a chimpanzee, and forced to gnaw our way 
through a thick shell of misprints and mispointings only 
to find (as is generally the case with Marston) a rancid 
kernel of meaning after all. But even Marston some- 
times deviates into poetry, as a man who wrote in that 
age could hardly help doing, and one of the few instances 
of it is in a speech of Erichtho, in the first scene of the 
fourth act of " Sophonisba," (Vol. I. p. 197,) which Mr. 
Halliwell presents to us in this shape : — 

" hardby the reverent ( ! ) mines 



Of a once glorious temple rear'd to Jove 
Whose very rubbish 

yet beares 

A deathlesse majesty, though now quite rac'd, [razed,] 
Hurl'd down by wrath and lust of impious kings, 
So that where holy Flamins [Flamens] wont to sing 
Sweet hymnes to Heaven, there the daw and crow, 
The ill-voyc'd raven, and still chattering pye, 
Send out ungratefull sounds and loathsome filth; 
Where statues and Joves acts were vively limbs, 

Where tombs and beautious urnes of well dead men 
Stood in assured rest," etc. 

The last verse and a half are worthy of Chapman ; but 
why did not Mr. Halliwell, who explains up-pont and I 
um, change "Joves acts were vively limbs " to " Jove's 
acts were lively limned," which was unquestionably what 
Marston wrote 1 

In the "Scourge of Villanie," (Vol. III. p. 252,) there 
is a passage which till lately had a. modern application in 
America, though happily archaic in England, which Mr. 
Halliwell suffers to stand thus : — 



308 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

"Once Albion lived in such a cruel age 
Than man did hold by servile vilenage: 
Poore brats were slaves of bondmen that were borne, 
And marted, sold : but that rude law is torne 
And disannuld, as too too inhumane." 

This should read — 

" Man man did hold in servile villanage; 
Poor brats were slaves (of bondmen that were born)"; 

and perhaps some American poet will one day write in 
the past tense similar verses of the barbarity of his fore- 
fathers. 

We will give one more scrap of Mr. Halli well's text : — 

" Yfaith, why then, caprichious mirth, 
Skip, light moriscoes, in our frolick blond, 
Flagg'd veines, sweete, plump with fresh-infused joyes ! " 

which Marston, doubtless, wrote thus : — 

" Pfaith, why then, capricious Mirth, 
Skip light moriscoes in our frolic blood! 
Flagg'd veins, swell plump with fresh-infused joys ! " 

We have quoted only a few examples from among the 
scores that we had marked, and against such a style of 
" editing " we invoke the shade of Marston himself. In 
the Preface to the Second Edition of the " Fawn," he 
says, " Reader, know I have perused this coppy, to make 
some satisfaction for the first faulty impression ; yet so ur- 
gent hath been my business that some errors have styll passed, 
which thy discretion may amend." 

Literally, to be sure, Mr. Halliwell has availed him- 
self of the permission of the poet, in leaving all emen- 
dation to the reader ; but certainly he has been false to 
the spirit of it in his self-assumed office of editor. The 
notes to explain vp-pont and / um give us a kind of 
standard of the highest intelligence which Mr. Halliwell 
dares to take for granted in the ordinary reader. Sup- 
posing this nousometer of his to be a centigrade, in what 
hitherto unconceived depths of cold obstruction can he 
find his zero-point of entire idiocy 1 ? The expansive force 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 309 

of average wits cannot be reckoned upon, as we see, to 
drive them up as far as the temperate degree of mis- 
prints in one syllable, and those, too, in their native 
tongue. A fortiori, then, Mr. Halliwell is bound to lend 
us the aid of his great learning wherever his author has 
introduced foreign words and the old printers have 
made pie of them. In a single case he has accepted his 
responsibility as dragoman, and the amount of his suc- 
cess is not such as to give us any poignant regret that 
he has everywhere else left us to our own devices. On 
p. 119, Vol. II., Francischina, a Dutchwoman, exclaims, 
" 0, mine aderliver love." Here is Mr. Halliwell's note. 
" Aderliver. — This is the speaker's error for alder-liever, 
the best beloved by all." Certainly not "the speaker's 
error," for Marston was no such fool as intentionally to 
make a Dutchwoman blunder in her own language. But 
is it an error for alderliever ? No, but for alderliefster. 
Mr. Halliwell might have found it in many an old Dutch 
song. For example, No. 96 of Hoffmann von Fallersle- 
ben's " Niederlandische Yolkslieder " begins thus : — 

" Mijn hert altijt heeft verlanghen 
Naer u, die alderliefste mijn." 

But does the word mean "best beloved by all"? No 
such thing, of course ; but " best beloved of all," — 
that is, by the speaker. 

In "Antonio and Mellida" (Vol. I. pp. 50, 51) occur 
some Italian verses, and here we hoped to fare better ; 
for Mr. Halliwell (as we learn from the title-page of his 
Dictionary) is a member of the " Beale Accidentia di 
Firenze? This is the Accademia delict Crusca, founded for 
the conservation of the Italian language in its purity, and 
it is rather a fatal symptom that Mr. Halliwell should in- 
dulge in the heresy of spelling Accademia with only one c. 
But let us see what our Delia Cruscan's notions of con- 
serving are. Here is a specimen : — 



310 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

" Bassiammi, coglier 1' aura odorata. 
Che in sua neggia in quello dolce labra. 
Dammi pimpero del tuo gradit' amore." 

It is clear enough that we ought to read, 

" Lasciami coglier, .... Che ha sua seggia, .... Dammi 1' impero. 1 ' 

A Delia Cruscan academician might at least have cor- 
rected by his dictionary the spelling and number of 
labra. 

We think that we have sustained our indictment of 
Mr. Halliweirs text with ample proof. The title of the 
book should have been, " The Works of John Marston, 
containing all the Misprints of the Original Copies, 
together with a few added for the First Time in this 
Edition, the whole carefully let alone by James Orchard 
Halliwell, F. R. S., F. S. A." It occurs to us that Mr. 
Halliwell may be also a Fellow of the Geological Society, 
and may have caught from its members the enthusiasm 
which leads him to attach so extraordinary a value to 
every goose-track of the Elizabethan formation. It is 
bad enough to be, as Marston was, one of those middling 
poets whom neither gods nor men nor columns (Horace 
had never seen a newspaper) tolerate ; but, really, even 
they do not deserve the frightful retribution of being 
reprinted by a Halliwell. 

We have said that we could not feel even the dubious 
satisfaction of knowing that the blunders of the old cop- 
ies had been faithfully followed in the reprinting. We 
see reason for doubting wdiether Mr. Halliwell ever read 
the proof-sheets. In his own notes we have found sev- 
eral mistakes. For instance, he refers to p. 159 when he 
means p. 153; he cites "I, but her life" instead of 
" lip " ; and he makes Spenser speak of " old Pithonus." 
Marston is not an author of enough importance to make 
it desirable that we should be put in possession of all 
the corrupted readings of his text, were such a thing 



LIBRAE Y OF OLD AUTHOES. 311 

possible even with the most minute painstaking, and Mr. 
Halliwell's edition loses its only claiuTto value the mo- 
ment a doubt is cast upon the accuracy of its inaccuracies. 
It is a matter of special import to us (whose means 
of access to originals are exceedingly limited) that the 
English editors of our old authors should be faithful and 
trustworthy, and we have singled out Mr. Halliwell's 
Marston for particular animadversion only because we 
think it on the whole the worst edition we ever saw of 
any author. 

Having exposed the condition in which our editor has 
left the text, we proceed to test his competency in an- 
other respect, by examining some of the emendations 
and explanations of doubtful passages which he proposes. 
These are very few ; but had they been even fewer, they 
had been too many. 

Among the dramatis persona? of the "Fawn," as we 
said before, occurs " GranufFo, a silent lord" He speaks 
only once during the play, and that in the last scene. 
In Act I. Scene 2, Gonzago says, speaking to Gramiffo, — 

" Now, sure, thou art a man 
Of a most learned scilence, and one whose words 
Have bin most pretions to me." 

This seems quite plain, but Mr, Halliwell annotates 
thus: " Scilence. — Query, science ? Th. Am mon read- 
ing, silence, may, however, be what is intenu^ ^ ' That 
the spelling should have troubled Mr. Halliwell is re- 
markable ; for elsewhere we find "god-boy "for "good- 
bye," "seace" for "cease," "bodies" for " boddice," 
"pollice" for "policy," " pitittying" for "pitying," 
"scence" for "sense," " Misenzius " for " Mezentius," 
" Ferazes " for " Ferrarese," — and plenty beside, equal- 
ly odd. That he should have doubted the meaning is 
no less strange ; for on p. 41 of the same play we read, 
" My Lord GranufFo, you may likewise stay, for I know 



312 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

you'l say nothing" — on pp. 55, 56, "This Granuffo is 
a l . lit wise good lord, a man of excellent discourse and 
never veals," — and on p. 94, we find the following dia- 
logue : - 

" Gon. My Lord Granuffo, this Fawne is an excellent fellow. 

" Don. Silence. 

" Gon. I warrant you for my lord here. 

In the same play (p. 44) are these lines : — 

" I apt for love ? 
Let lazy idlenes fild full of wine 
Heated with meates, high feclde with lustfull ease 
Goe dote on culler [color]. As forme, why, death a sence, 
I court the ladie ? " 

This is Mr. Halliwell's note : " Death a sence. — ' Earth 
a sense,' ed. 1633. Mr. Dilke suggests : 'For me, wiry, 
earth's as sensible.' The original is not necessarily cor- 
rupt. It may mean, — why, yon might as well think 
Death was a sense, one of the senses. See a like phrase 
at p. 77." What help we should get by thinking Death 
one of the senses, it would demand another (Edipus to 
unriddle. Mr. Halliwell can astonish us no longer, but 
we are surprised at Mr. Dilke, the very competent 
editor of the " Old English Plays," 1815. From him we 
might have hoped for better things. " Death o' sense ! " 
is an exclamation. Throughout these volumes we find a 
for o', — as, "a clock" for "o'clock," "a the side" for 
" o' the side." A similar exclamation is to be found in 
three other places in the same play, where the sense 
is obvious. Mr. Halliwell refers to one of them on 
p. 77, — " Death a man ! is she delivered 1 " The others 
are, — " Death a justice ! are we in Normandy'? " (p. 98) ; 
and "Death a discretion ! if I should prove a foole now," 
or, as given by Mr. Halliwell, " Death, a discretion ! " 
Now let us apply Mr. Halliwell's explanation. " Death 
a man ! " you might as well think Death was a man, 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 313 

that is, one of the men ! — or a discretion, that is, one 
of the discretions ! — or a justice, that is, one of the 
quorum ! We trust Mr. Halliwell may never have the 
editing of Bob Acres's imprecations. " Odd's triggers ! " 
he would say, "that is, as odd as, or as strange as, triggers." 
Vol. III. p. 77, "the vote-killing mandrake." Mr. 
Halliwell' s note is, " vote-hilling. — ' Voice-killing,' ed. 
1613. It may well be doubted whether either be the 
correct reading." He then gives a familiar citation from 
Browne's " Vulgar Errors." " Vote-killing " may be a mere 
misprint for " note-killing," but "voice-killing" is certain- 
ly the better reading. Either, however, makes sense. Al- 
though Sir Thomas Browne does not allude to the dead- 
ly property of the mandrake's shriek, yet Mr. Halliwell, 
who has edited Shakespeare, might have remembered 
the 

" Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake's groan." 

(Second Part of Henry VI., Act III. Scene 2.) 

and the notes thereon in the variorum edition. In Ja- 
cob Grimm's " Deutsche My thologie," (Vol. II. p. 1154,) 
under the word Alraun, may be found a full account of 
the superstitions concerning the mandrake. " When it 
is dug up, it groans and shrieks so dreadfully that the dig- 
ger will surely die. One must, therefore, before sunrise 
on a Friday, having first stopped one's ears with wax or 
cotton-wool, take with him an entirely black dog without 
a white hair on him, make the sign of the cross three 
times over the alraun, and dig about it till the root 
holds only by thin fibres. Then tie these by a string to 
the tail of the dog, show him a piece of bread, and run 
away as fast as possible. The dog runs eagerly after 
the bread, pulls up the root, and falls stricken dead by 
its groan of pain." 

These, we believe, are the only instances in which Mr. 
Halliwell has ventured to give any opinion upon the 
14 



o 



14 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



text, except as to a palpable misprint, here and there. 
Two of these we have already cited. There is one other, 

— "p. 4G, line 10. Inconstant. — An error for incon- 
stant." Wherever there is a real difficulty, he leaves us 
in the lurch. For example, in " What you Will," he 
prints without comment, — 

"Ha! he mount Chirall on the wings of fame ! " 

(Vol.1, p. 239.) 

which should be " mount cheval," as it is given in Mr. 
Dilke's edition (Old English Plays, Vol. II. p. 222). We 
cite this, not as the worst, but $lq shortest, example at 
hand. 

Some of Mr. Halliwell's notes are useful and interest- 
ing, — as that on "keeling the pot," and a few others, 

— but the greater part are utterly useless. He thinks 
it necessaiy, for instance, to explain that "to speak pure 
foole, is in sense equivalent to ' I will speak like a pure 
fool/" — that "belktup" means " belched up," — that 
" aprecocks " means " apricots." He has notes also upon 
"meal-mouthed," "luxuriousnesse," "termagant," "fico," 
" estro," " a nest of goblets," which indicate either that 
the "general reader" is a less intelligent person in Eng- 
land than in America, or that Mr. Halliwell's standard of 
scholarship is very low. We ourselves, from our limited 
reading, can supply him with a reference which will ex- 
plain the allusion to the " Scotch barnacle " much bet- 
ter than his citations from Sir John Maundeville and 
Giraldus Cambrensis, — namely, note 8, on page 179 
of a Treatise on Worms, by Dr. Ramesey, court physician 
to Charles II. 

We tarn now to Mr. Hazlitt's edition of Webster. We 
wish he bad chosen Chapman ; for Mr. Dyce's Webster 
is hardly out of print, and, we believe, has just gone 
through a second and revised edition. Webster was a 



LIBRAE Y OF OLD AUTHORS. 315 

far more considerable man than Marston, and infinitely 
above him in genius. Without the poetic nature of 
Marlowe, or Chapman's somewhat unwieldy vigor of 
thought, he had that inflammability of mind which, un- 
tempered by a solid understanding, made his plays a 
strange mixture of vivid expression, incoherent declama- 
tion, dramatic intensity, and extravagant conception of 
character. He was not, in the highest sense of the word, 
a great dramatist. Shakespeare is the only one of that 
age. Marlowe had a rare imagination, a delicacy of 
sense that made him the teacher of Shakespeare and 
Milton in versification, and was, perhaps, as purely a 
poet as any that England has produced ; but his mind 
had no balance-wheel. Chapman abounds in splendid 
enthusiasms of diction, and now and then dilates our 
imaginations with suggestions of profound poetic depth. 
Ben Jonson was a conscientious and intelligent workman, 
whose plays glow, here and there, with the golden pollen 
of that poetic feeling with which his age impregnated all 
thought and expression; but his leading characteristic, 
like that of his great namesake, Samuel, was a hearty 
common sense, which fitted him rather to be a great 
critic than a great poet. He had a keen and ready eye 
for the comic in situation, but no humor. Fletcher was 
as much a poet as fancy and sentiment can make any 
man. Only Shakespeare wrote comedy and tragedy with 
truly ideal elevation and breadth. Only Shakespeare 
had that true sense of humor which, like the universal 
solvent sought by the alchemists, so fuses together all 
the elements of a character, (as in FalstafF,) that any 
question of good or evil, of dignified or ridiculous, is 
silenced by the apprehension of its thorough humanity. 
Rabelais shows gleams of it in Panurge ; but, in our 
opinion, no man ever possessed it in an equal degree 
w r ith Shakespeare, except Cervantes ; no man has since 



316 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

shown anything like an approach to it, (for Moliere's qual- 
ity was comic power rather than humor,) except Sterne, 
Fielding, and perhaps Richter. Only Shakespeare was 
endowed with that healthy equilibrium of nature whose 
point of rest was midway between the imagination and 
the understanding, — that perfectly unruffled brain 
which reflected all objects with almost inhuman impar- 
tiality, — that outlook whose range was ecliptical, dom- 
inating all zones of human thought and action, — that 
power of veri-similar conception which could take away 
Richard III. from History, and Ulysses from Homer, — ■ 
and that creative faculty whose equal touch is alike vivi- 
fying in Shallow and in Lear. He alone never seeks in 
abnormal and monstrous characters to evade the risks 
and responsibilities of absolute truthfulness, nor to stim- 
iilate a jaded imagination by Caligulan horrors of plot. 
He is never, like many of his fellow-dramatists, con- 
fronted with unnatural Frankensteins of his own making, 
whom he must get off his hands as best he may. Given 
a human foible, he can incarnate it in the nothingness 
of Slender, or make it loom gigantic through the tragic 
twilight of Hamlet. We are tired of the vagueness 
which classes all the Elizabethan playwrights, together 
as "great dramatists," — as if Shakespeare did not dif- 
fer from them in kind as well as in degree. Fine poets 
some of them were ; but though imagination and the 
power of poetic expression are, singly, not uncommon 
gifts, and even in combination not without secular ex- 
amples, yet it is the rarest of earthly phenomena to find 
them joined with those faculties of perception, arrange- 
ment, and plastic instinct in the loving union which 
alone makes a great dramatic poet possible. We suspect 
that Shakespeare will long continue the only specimen 
of the genus. His contemporaries, in their comedies, 
cither force what they call "a humor" till it becomes 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 317 

fantastical, or hunt for jokes, like rat-catchers, in the 
sewers of human nature and of language. In their 
tragedies they become heavy without grandeur, like Jon- 
son, or mistake the stilts for the cothurnus, as Chapman 
and Webster too often do. Every new edition of an Eliza- 
bethan dramatist is but the putting of another witness 
into the box to prove the inaccessibility of Shakespeare's 
stand-point as poet and artist. 

Webster's most famous works are " The Duchess of 
Malfy " and " Vittoria Corombona," but we are strongly 
inclined to call " The Devil's Law-Case " his best play. 
The two former are in a great measure answerable for 
the " spasmodic" school of poets, since the extravagances 
of a man of genius are as sure of imitation as the equa- 
ble self-possession of his higher moments is incapable of 
it. Webster had, no doubt, the primal requisite of a 
poet, imagination, but in him it was truly untamed, and 
Aristotle's admirable distinction between the Horrible 
and the Terrible in tragedy was never better illustrated 
and confirmed than in the " Duchess" and "Vittoria." 
His nature had something of the sleuth-hound quality 
in it, and a plot, to keep his mind eager on the trail, 
must be sprinkled with fresh blood at every turn. We 
do not forget all the fine things that Lamb has said of 
Webster, but, when Lamb wrote, the Elizabethan drama 
was an El Dorado, w T hose micaceous sand, even, was 
treasured as auriferous, — and no wonder, in a genera- 
tion which admired the " Botanic Garden." Webster is 
the Gherardo della Notte of his day, and himself calls 
his "Vittoria Corombona" a "night-piece." Though he 
had no conception of Nature in its large sense, as some- 
thing pervading a whole character and making it consist- 
ent with itself, nor of Art, as that which dominates an 
entire tragedy and makes all the characters foils to each 
other and tributaries to the catastrophe, yet there are 



318 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

flashes of Nature in his plays, struck out by the collisions 
of passion, and dramatic intensities of phrase for which 
it would be hard to find the match. The "prithee, un- 
do this button " of Lear, by which Shakespeare makes us 
feel the swelling of the old king's heart, and that the 
bodily results of mental anguish have gone so far as to 
deaden for the moment all intellectual consciousness and 
forbid all expression of grief, is hardly finer than the 
broken verse which Webster puts into the mouth of 
Ferdinand when he sees the body of his sister, murdered 
by his own procurement : — 

" Cover her face: mine eyes dazzle: she died young." 

He has not the condensing power of Shakespeare, who 
squeezed meaning into a phrase with an hydraulic press, 
but he could carve a cherry-stone with any of the concet- 
tisti, and abounds in imaginative quaintnesses that are 
worthy of Donne, and epigrammatic tersenesses that re- 
mind us of Fuller. Nor is he wanting in poetic phrases 
of the purest crystallization. Here are a few examples : — 

" Oh, if there be another world i' th' moon, 
As some fantastics dream, I could wish all men, 
The whole race of them, for their inconstancy, 
Sent thither to people that ! " 

(Old Chaucer was yet slier. After saying that Lamech 
was the first faithless lover, he adds, — 

" And he invented tents, unless men lie," — 
implying that he was the prototype of nomadic men.) 

" Virtue is ever sowing of her seeds: 
In the trenches, for the soldier; in the wakeful study, 
For the scholar; in the furrows of the sea, 
For men of our profession [merchants]; all of which 
Arise and spring up honor." 

("Of all which," Mr. Hazlitt prints it.) 

" Poor Jolenta ! should she hear of this, 
She would not after the report keep fresh 
So lonfr as flowers on craves." 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 319 

" For sin and shame are ever tied together 
With Gordian knots of such a strong thread spun, 
They cannot without violence be undone." 

" One whose mind 
Appears more like a ceremonious chapel 
Full of sweet music, than a thronging presence." 

" What is death? 
The safest trench i' th' world to keep man free 
From Fortune's gunshot." 

" It has ever been my opinion 
That there are none love perfectly indeed, 
But those that hang or drown themselves for love," 

says Julio, anticipating Butler's __ 

" But he that drowns, or blows out 's brains, 
The Devil's in him, If he feigns." 

He also anticipated La Rochefoucauld and Byron in their 
apophthegm concerning woman's last love. In " The 
Devil's Law-Case," Leonora says, — 

" For, as we love our youngest children best, 
So the last fruit of our affection, 
Wherever we bestow it, is most strong, 
Most violent, most unresistible; 
Since 't is, indeed, our latest harvest-home, 
Last merriment 'fore winter." 

In editing Webster, Mr. Hazlitt had the advantage 
(except in a single doubtful play) of a predecessor in the 
Rev. Alexander Dyce, beyond all question the best living 
scholar of the literature of the times of Elizabeth and 
James I. If he give no proof of remarkable fitness for 
his task, he seems, at least, to have been diligent and 
painstaking. His notes are short and to the point, and 
— which we consider a great merit — at the foot of the 
page. If he had added a glossarial index, we should 
have been still better pleased. Mr. Hazlitt seems to 
have read over the text with some .care, and he has had 
the good sense to modernize the orthography, or, as ne 
says, has "observed the existing standard of spelling 



320 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

throughout.'* Yet — for what reason we cannot imagine 

■ — he prints " I " for " ay," taking the pains to explain 

it every time in a note, and retains " banquerout " and 

" coram " apparently for the sake of telling us that 

they mean "bankrupt" and "quorum." He does not 

seem to have a quick ear for scansion, which would 

sometimes have assisted him to the true reading. We 

give an example or two : — 

" The obligation wherein we all stood bound 
Cannot be concealed [cancelled] without great reproach." 

" The realm, not they, 
Must be regarded. Be [we] strong and bold, 
We are the people's factors." 

" Shall not be o'erburdened [overburdened] in our reign 

u A merry heart 
And a good stomach to [a] feast are all." 

" Have her meat serv'd up by bawds and ruffians " [dtle " up. "J 

" Brother or father 
In [a] dishonest suit, shall be to me." 

" What's she in Rome your greatness cannot awe, 
Or your rich purse purchase? Promises and threats." [dele the 
second "your."] 

" Through clouds of envy and disast [rous] change." 

" The Devil drives ; 'tis [it is] full time to go." 

He has overlooked some* strange blunders. What is the 

meaning of 

" Laugh at your misery, as foredeeming you 
An idle meteor, which drawn forth, the earth 
Would soon be lost i' the air " ? 

We hardly need say that it should be 

" An idle meteor, which, drawn forth the earth, 
Would," &c. 

".Forwardness " for /rowardness," (Vol. II. p. 87,) "ten- 
nis-balls struck and banc/ecZ" for "bandied" (lb. p. 275,) 
may be errors of the press ; but 

" Come, I'll love you wisely: 
That's jealousy," 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 321 

has crept in by editorial oversight for " wisely, that 's 
jealously." So have 

" Ay, the great emperor of [or] the mighty Cham "; 



and 
and 

and 



' This wit [with] taking long journeys "; 

44 Virginius, thou dost but supply my place, 

I thine: Fortune hath lift me [fhee] to my chair, 
And thrown me headlong to thy pleading bar " ; 



"i I'll pour my soul into my daughter's belly, [body,] 
And with my soldier's tears embalm her wounds." 

We suggest that the change of an a to an r would 
make sense of the following: "Come, my little punk, 
with thy two compositors, to this unlawful painting- 
house," [printing-house,] which Mr. Hazlitt awkwardly 
endeavors to explain by this note on the word compos- 
itors, — " i. e. (conjecturally), making up the composition 
of the picture " ! Our readers can decide for themselves ; 
— the passage occurs Vol. I. p. 214. 

We think Mr. Hazlitt's notes are, in the main, good ; 
but we should like to know his authority for saying that 
l^ench means "the hole in a bench by which it was taken 
up," — that "descant" means " look askant on," — and 
that " I wis " is equivalent to " I surmise, imagine,'* 
which it surely is not in the passage to which his note is 
appended. On page 9, Vol. I., w r e read in the text, 

<4 To whom, my lord, bends thus your awe," 

and in the note, " i. e. submission. The original has 
aue, which, if it mean ave, is unmeaning here." Did Mr. 
Hazlitt never see a picture of the Annunciation with ave 
written on the scroll proceeding from the bending angel's 
mouth 1 We find the same word in Vol. III. p. 217 : — 

44 Whose station's built on avees and applause." 

Vol. III. pp.47, 48: — 

"~ H* u 



322 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

" And then rest, gentle bones ; yet pray 
That when by the precise you are view'd, 
A supersedeas be not sued 
To remove you to a place more airy, 
That in your stead they may keep chary 
Stockfish or seacoal, for the abuses 
Of sacrilege have turned graves to viler uses." 

To the last verse Mr. Hazlitt appends this note, " Than 
that of burning men's bones for fuel." There is no allu- 
sion here to burning men's bones, but simply to the des- 
ecration of graveyards by building warehouses upon 
them, in digging the foundations for which the bones 
would be thrown out. The allusion is, perhaps, to the 
" Churchyard of the Holy Trinity " ; — see Stow's Sur- 
vey, ed. 1603, p. 126. Elsewhere, in the same play, 
Webster alludes bitterly to " begging church-land." 

Vol. I. p. 73, " And if he walk through the street, he 
ducks at the penthouses, like an ancient that dares Dot 
nourish at the oathtakiug of the prsetor for fear of the 
signposts." Mr. Hazlitt's note is, " Ancient was a stand- 
ard or flag ; also an ensign, of which Skinner says it is a 
corruption. What the meaning of the simile is the pres- 
ent editor cannot suggest." We confess we find no diffi- 
culty. The meaning plainly is, that he ducks for fear 
of hitting the penthouses, as an ensign on the Lord 
Mayor's day dares not flourish his standard for fear of 
hitting the signposts. We suggest the query, whether 
ancient, in this sense, be not a corruption of the Italian 
word anziano. 

Want of space compels us to leave many other pas- 
sages, which we had marked for comment, unnoticed. 
We are surprised that Mr. Hazlitt, (see his Introduction 
to " Vittoria Corombona,") in undertaking to give us 
some information concerning the Dukedom and Castle of 
Bracciano, should uniformly spell it Brachiano. Shake- 
speare's Petruchio might have put him on his guard. 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 323 

We should be glad also to know in what part of Italy 
he places Malfi. 

Mr. Hazlitt's General Introduction supplies us with 
no new information, but this was hardly to be expected 
where Mr. Dyce had already gone over the field. We 
wish that he had been able to give us better means 
of distinguishing the three almost contemporary John 
Websters one from the other, for we think the internal 
evidence is enough to show that all the plays attributed 
to the author of the " Duchess " and " Vittoria " could 
not have been written by the same person. On the 
whole, he has given us a very respectable, and certainly 
a very pretty, edition of an eminent poet. 

We could almost forgive all other shortcomings of Mr. 
Smith's library for the great gift it brings us in the five 
volumes of Chapman's translations. Coleridge, sending 
Chapman's Homer to Wordsworth, writes, " What is 
stupidly said of Shakespeare is really true and appropri- 
ate 6f Chapman ; mighty faults counterpoised by mighty 

beauties It is as truly an original poem as the 

Faery Queene ; — it will # give you small idea of Homer, 
though a far truer one than Pope's epigrams, or Cowper's 
cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For Chap- 
man writes and feels as a poet, — as Homer might have 
written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen 
Elizabeth. In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of 
its frequent and perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, 
which are, however, amply repaid by almost unexampled 
sweetness and beauty of language, all over spirit and 
feeling." * From a passage of his Preface it would ap- 
pear that Chapman had been criticised pretty sharply 
in his own day for amplifying his author. " And this 
one example I thought necessary to insert here to show 
* Literary Remains, Vol I. pp. 259, 260. 



324 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

my detractors that they have no reason to vilify my 
circumlocution sometimes, when their most approved 
Grecians, Homer's interpreters generally, hold him fit 
to be so converted. Yet how much I differ, and with 
what authority, let my impartial and judicial reader 
judge. Always conceiving how pedantical and absurd 
an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author 
(much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when 
(according to Horace and other best lawgivers to trans- 
lators) it is the part of every knowing and judicial inter- 
preter not to follow the number and order of words, but 
the material things themselves, and sentences to weigh 
diligently, and to clothe and adorn them with words and 
such a style and form of oration as are most apt for the 
language in which they are converted." Again in his 
verses To the Reader, he speaks of 

" The amplt transmigration to be shown 
By nature-loving Poesy," 

and defends his own use of " needful periphrases," and 

says that " word for word " translation is to 

"Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender." 

" For even as different a production 
Ask Greek and English : since, as they in sounds 
And letters shun one form and unison, 
So have their sense and elegancy bounds 
In their distinguished natures, and require 
Only a judgment to make both consent 
In sense and elocution." 

There are two theories of translation, — literal para- 
phrase and free reproduction. At best, the translation 
of poetry is but an imitation of natural flowers in cam- 
bric or wax ; and however much of likeness there may 
be, the aroma, whose charm of indefinable suggestion in 
the association of ideas is so powerful, is precisely what 
is lost irretrievably. From where it lurked in the im- 
mortal verse, a presence divined rather than ascertained, 



LIBRAEY OF OLD AUTHORS. 325 

baffling the ear which it enchanted, escaping the grasp 
which yet it thrilo S, airy, evanescent, imperishable, 
beckoning the imagination with promises better than 
any fulfilment, 

" The parting genius is with sighing sent." 

The paraphrase is a plaster-cast of the Grecian urn ; the 
reproduction, if by a ma*n of genius, is like Keats's ode, 
which makes the figures move and the leaves tremble 
again, if not with the old life, with a sorceiy which de- 
ceives the fancy. Of all English poets, Keats was the 
one to have translated Homer. 

In any other than a mere prose version of a great 
poem, we have a right to demand that it give us at 
least an adequate impression of force and originality. 
We have a right to ask, If this poem were published 
now for the first time, as the work of a contemporary, 
should we read it, not with the same, but with anything 
like the same conviction of its freshness, vigor, and origi- 
nality, its high level of style and its witchery of verse, 
that Homer, if now for the first time discovered, would 
infallibly beget in us 1 Perhaps this looks like asking for 
a new Homer to translate the old one ; but if this be too 
much, it is certainly not unfair to insist that the feeling 
given us should be that of life, and not artifice. 

The Homer of Chapman, whatever its defects, alone 
of all English versions has this crowning merit of being, 
where it is most successful, thoroughly alive. He has 
made for us the best poem that has yet been Englished 
out of Homer, and in so far gives us a truer idea of him. 
Of all translators he is farthest removed from the fault 
with which he charges others, when he says that " our 
divine master's most ingenious imitating the life of things 
(which is the soul of a poem) is never respected nor per- 
ceived by his interpreters only standing pedantically on 



326 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

the grammar and words, utterly ignorant of the sense 
and grace of him." His mastery oftiinglish is something 
wonderful even in an age of masters, when the language 
was still a mother-tongue, and not a contrivance of ped- 
ants and grammarians. He had a reverential sense of 
" our divine Homer's depth and gravity, which will not 
open itself to the curious austerity of belaboring art, but 
only to the natural and most ingenious soul of our 
thrice-sacred Poesy." His task was as holy to him as a 
version of Scripture ; he justifies the tears of Achilles by 
those of Jesus, and the eloquence of his horse by that of 
Balaam's less noble animal. He does not always keep 
close to his original, but he sins no more, even in this, 
than any of his rivals. He is especially great in the 
similes. Here he rouses himself always, and if his en- 
thusiasm sometimes lead him to heighten a little, or 
even to add outright, he gives us a picture full of life 
and action, or of the grandeur and beauty of nature, as 
stirring to the fancy as his original. Of all who have 
attempted Homer, he has the topping merit of being in- 
spired by him. 

In the recent discussions of Homeric translation in 
England, it has always been taken for granted that we 
had or could have some adequate conception of Homer's 
metre. Lord Derby, in his Preface, plainly assumes 
this. But there can be no greater fallacy. No human 
ears, much less Greek ones, could have endured what, 
with our mechanical knowledge of the verse, ignorance 
of the accent, and English pronunciation, we blandly ac- 
cept for such music as Homer chanted. We have utterly 
lost the tune and cannot reproduce it. Mr. Newman 
conjectures it to have been something like Yankee Doo- 
dle ; Mr. Arnold is sure it was the English hexameter ; 
and they are both partly right so far as we may trust 
our reasonable impressions ; for, after all, an impression 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 327 

is all that we have. Cowper attempts to give the ring 
of the dpyvpeoio /3toio by 

" Dread-sounding, bounding on the silver bow," 

which only too fatally recalls the old Scottish dancing- 
tune, — 

" Amaisit I gaisit 

To see, led at command, 

A strampant and rampant 

Ferss lyon in his hand." 

The attempt was in the right direction, however, for 
Homer, like Dante and Shakespeare, like all who really 
command language, seems fond of playing with asso- 
nances. No doubt the Homeric verse consented at will 
to an eager rapidity, and no doubt also its general char- 
acter is that of prolonged but unmonotonous roll. Every- 
body says it is like the long ridges of the sea, some 
overtopping their neighbors a little, each with an inde- 
pendent undulation of its crest, yet all driven by a 
common impulse, and breaking, not with the sudden 
snap of an imyielding material, but one after the other, 
w T ith a stately curve, to slide back and mingle with those 
that follow. Chapman's measure has the disadvantage 
of an association with Sternhold and Hopkins, but it has 
the merit of length, and, where he is in the right mood, 
is free, spirited, and sonorous. Above all, there is every- 
where the movement of life and passion in it. Chap- 
man was a master of verse, making it hurry, linger, or 
stop short, to suit the meaning. Like all great versifiers 
he must be read with study, for the slightest change of 
accent loses the expression of an entire passage. His 
great fault as a translator is that he takes fire too easily 
and runs beyond his author. Perhaps he intensifies too 
much, though this be a fault on the right side ; he cer- 
tainty sometimes weakens the force of passages by crowd- 
ing in particulars which Homer had wisely omitted, for 



328 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Homer's simplicity is by no means mere simplicity of 
thought, nor, as it is often foolishly called, of nature. It is 
the simplicity of consummate art, the last achievement of 
poets and the invariable characteristic of the greatest 
among them. To Chapman's mind once warmed to its 
work, the words are only a mist, suggesting, while it 
hides, the divine form of the original image or thought ; 
and his imagination strives to body forth that, as he 
conceives it, in all its celestial proportions. Let us com- 
pare with Lord Derby's version, as the latest, a passage 
where Chapman merely intensities (Book XIIL, begin- 
ning at the 86th verse in Lord Derby, the 73d of Chap- 
man, and the 76th of Homer) : — • 

" Whom answered thus the son of Telamon: 
' My hands, too, grasp with firmer hold the spear, 
My spirit, like thine, is stirred; I feel my feet 
Instinct with fiery life; nor should I fear 
With Hector, son of Priam, in his might 
Alone to meet, and grapple to the death.' " 

Thus Lord Derby. Chapman renders : — 

" This Telamonius thus received: ' So, to my thoughts, my hands 
Burn with desire to toss my lance; each foot beneath me stands 
Bare on bright fire to use his speed ; my heart is raised so high, 
That to encounter Hector's self I long insatiately.' " 

There is no question which version is the more ener- 
getic. Is Lord Derby's nearer the original in being 
tamer 1 He has taken the " instinct with fiery life " 
from Chapman's hint. The original has simply " rest- 
less," or more familiarly "in a fidget." There is noth- 
ing about " grappling to the death," and " nor should I 
fear " is feeble where Chapman with his " long insatiate- 
ly" is literal. We will give an example where Chap- 
man has amplified his original (Book XVI. v. 426 ; 
Derby, 494 ; Chapman, 405) : — 

" Down jumped he from his chariot; down leapt his foe as light; 
And as, on some far-looking rock, a cast of vultures fight, 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 329 

Fly on each other, strike and truss, part, meet, and then stick by, 
Tug both with crooked beaks and seres, cry, fight, and fight and cry, 
So fiercely fought these angry kings." * 

Lord Derby's version is nearer : — 

" He said, and from his car, accoutred, sprang; 
Patroclus saw and he too leaped to earth. 
As on a lofty rock, with angry screams, 
Hook-beaked, with talons curved, two vultures fight, 
So with loud shouts these two to battle rushed." 

Chapman has made his first line out of two in Homer, 
but, granting the license, how rapid and springy is the 
verse ! Lord Derby's " withs " are not agreeable, his 
"shouts" is an ill-chosen word for a comparison with 
vultures, " talons curved " is feeble, and his verse is, as 
usual, mainly built up of little blocks of four syllables 
each. " To battle " also is vague. With whom 1 Ho- 
mer says that they rushed each at other. We shall not 
discuss how much license is loyal in a translator, but, as 
we think his chief aim should be to give a feeling of that 
life and spirit which makes the immortality of his origi- 
nal, and is the very breath in the nostrils of all poetry, 
he has a right to adapt himself to the genius of his own 
language. If he would do justice to his author, he must 
make up in one passage for his unavoidable shortcomings 
in another. He may here and there take for granted 
certain exigencies of verse in his original which he feels 
in his own case. Even Dante, who boasted that no word 
had ever made him say what he did not wish, should 
have made an exception of rhyming ones, for these some- 
times, even in so abundant a language as the Italian, 
have driven the most straightforward of poets into an 
awkward detour. 

We give one more passage from Chapman : — 

* Chapman himself was evidently pleased with this; for he cites it 
as a sample of his version. 



330 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

" And all in golden weeds 
He clothed himself; the golden scourge most elegantly done 
He took and mounted to his seat; and then the god begun 
To drive his chariot through the waves. From whirl-pits every way 
The whales exulted under him, and knew their king; the sea 
For joy did open, and his horse so swift and lightly flew 
The under axle-tree of brass no drop of water drew." 

Here the first half is sluggish and inadequate, but what 
surging vigor, what tumult of the sea, what swiftness, 
in the last ! Here is Lord Derby's attempt : — 

" All clad in gold, the golden lash he grasped 
Of curious work, and, mounting on his car, 
Skimmed o'er the waves; from all the depths below 
Gambolled around the monsters of the deep, 
Acknowledging their king: the joyous sea 
Parted her waves; swift flew the bounding steeds, 
Nor was the brazen axle wet with spray." 

Chapman here is truer to his master, and the motion is 
in the verse itself. Lord Derby's is description, and not 
picture. " Monsters of the deep " is an example of the 
hackneyed periphrases in which he abounds, like all men 
to whom language is a literary tradition, and not a living 
gift of the Muses. " Lash " is precisely the wrong word. 
Chapman is always great at sea. Here is another exam- 
ple from the Fourteenth Book : — 

" And as, Avhen with unwieldy waves the great sea fare/eels winds 
That both ways murmur, and no way her certain current finds. 
But pants and swells confusedly, here goes, and there will stay, 
Till on it air casts one firm wind, and then it rolls away." 

Observe how the somewhat ponderous movement of the 
first verse assists the meaning of the words. 

He is great, too, in single phrases and lines : — 

"And as, from top of some steep hill, the Lightener strips a cloud 
And lets a great sky otit of Heaven, in whose delightsome light 
All prominent foreheads, forests, towers, and temples cheer the sight." 

(Book XVI. v. 286.) 

The lion "lets his rough brows down so low they hide 
his eyes"; the flames " wrastle" in the woods; "rude 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 331 

feet dim the day with a fog of dust ; " and so in a hun- 
dred other instances. 

For an example of hi3 more restrained vigor, take the 
speech of Sarpedon in the Twelfth Book of the Iliad, 
and for poetic beauty, the whole story of Ulysses and 
Nausikaa in the Odyssey. It was here that Keats made 
himself Grecian and learned to versify. 

Mr. Hooper has done his work of editing well. But 
he has sometimes misapprehended his author, and dis- 
torted his meaning by faulty punctuation. In one of 
the passages already cited, Mr. Hooper's text stands 
thus: "Lest I be prejudiced with opinion, to dissent, 
of ignorance, or singularity." All the commas which 
darken the sense should be removed. Chapman meant 
to say, " Lest I be condemned beforehand by people 
thinking I dissent out of ignorance or singularity." (Iliad 
Vol. I. p. 23.) So on the next page the want of a hyphen 
makes nonsense : "And saw the round coming [round- 
coming] of this silver bow of our Phoebus," that is, the 
crescent coming to the full circle. In the translations, 
too, the pointing needs reformation now and then, but 
shows, on the whole, a praiseworthy fidelity. We will 
give a few examples of what we believe to be errors on 
the part of Mr. Hooper, who, by the way, is weakest on 
points which concern the language of Chapman's day. 
We follow the order of the text as most convenient. 

"Bid" (II. i.) is explained to mean "threaten, chal- 
lenge," where " offer " would be the right word. 

" And cast 
The offal of all to the deep." (II. i. 309.) 

Surely a slip of Chapman's pen. He must have intended 
to write " Of all the offal," a transversion common with 
him and needed here to avoid a punning jingle. 

" So much I must affirm our power exceeds th' inhabitant." (II. ii. 110.) 



332 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Mr. Hooper's note is " inhabiters, viz. of Troy." " In- 
habitant " is an adjective agreeing with "power." Our 
power without exceeds that within. 

" Yet all this time to stay, 
Out of our judgments, for our end, and now to take our way 
Without it were absurd and vile." (II. h. 257.) 

A note on this passage tells us that " out of judgments" 
means " against our inclinations." It means simply " in 
accordance with our good judgment," just as we still say 
" out of his wisdom." Compare 11. iii. 63, 

" Hector, because thy sharp reproof is out of justice given, 
I take it well." 

14 And as Jove, brandishing a star which men a comet call, 
Hurls out his curled hair abroad, that from his brand exhals 
A thousand sparks." (II. iv. S5.) 

Mr. Hooper's note is " ' Which men a comet calV — so 
both the folios. Dr. Taylor has printed i which man a 
comet calls.'' This certainly suits the rhyme, but I ad- 
here to Chapman's text." Both editors have misunder- 
stood the passage. The fault is not in " call " but in 
" exhals," a clear misprint for " exhall," the spelling, as 
was common, being conformed to the visible rhyme. 
" That " means " so that " (a frequent Elizabethan con- 
struction) and "exhall" is governed by " sparks." The 
meaning is, "As when Jove, brandishing a comet, hurls 
out its curled hair so that a thousand sparks exhale 
from its burning." 

" The evicke skipping from the rock." 

Mr. Hooper tells us, " It is doubtful what this word 
really" is. Dr. Taylor suggests that it may probably 
mean the evict, or doomed one — but ? It is possible 
Chapman meant to Anglicize the Greek cu£ ; or should 
we read Ibex, as the al'£ 'Igdkos was such 1 " The word 
means the chamois, and is merely the English form of the 
French ibiche. Dr. Taylor's reading would amaze us 



LIBRAEY OF OLD AUTHORS. 333 

were we not familiar with the commentators on Shake- 
speare. 

M And now they out-ray to your fleet." (II. v. 793.) 

" Oui-ray — spread out in array ; abbreviated from ar- 
ray. Dr. Taylor says 'rush out,' from the Anglo- 
Saxon ' rean, 3 to flow ; but there seems no necessity for 
such an etymology." We should think not ! Chapman, 
like Pope, made his first sketch from the French, and 
corrected it by the Greek. Those who would under- 
stand Chapman's English must allow for traces of his 
French guide here and there. This is one of them, per- 
haps. The word is etymologically unrelated to array. 
It is merely the old French oultreer, a derivative of 
ultra. It means " they pass beyond their gates even to 
your fleet." He had said just before that formerly 
"your foes durst not a foot address without their ports" 
The word occurs again II. xxiii. 413. 

" When none, though many kings put on, could make his vaunt, he led 
Tydides to renewed assault or issued first the dike." (.11. viii. 217.) 

" Tydides. — He led Tydides, i. e. Tydides he led. An 
unusual construction." Not in the least. The old print- 
ers or authors sometimes put a comma where some con- 
necting particle was left out. We had just now an in- 
stance where one took the place of so. Here it supplies 
that. "None could make his vaunt that he led (that 
is, was before) Tydides." We still use the word in the 
same sense, as the " leading " horse in a race. 
" And all did wilfully expect the silver-throned mom." (II. viii. 497 ) 

" Wilfully — willingly, anxiously." Wishfully, as else- 
where in Chapman. 

" And as, upon a rich man's crop of barley or of wheat, 
Opposed for swiftness at their work, a sort of reapers sweat." 

" Opposed — standing opposite to one another for expedi- 
tion's sake." We hope Mr. Hooper understood his own 



334 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

note, for it baffles us utterly. The meaning is simply 

" pitted against each other to see which will reap most 

swiftly." In a note (II. xi. 417) we are told that "the 

etymology [of lucerii\ seems uncertain." It is nothing 

more than a corruption of the old French leucerve (loup- 

cervier). 

" I would then make-in in deed and steep 
My income in their bloods." (II. xvii. 481.) 

" Income — communication, or infusion, of courage from 
the Gods. The word in this sense Todd says was a 
favorite in Cromwell's time." A surprising note! In- 
come here means nothing more than " onfall," as the con- 
text shows. 

" To put the best in «re." (II. xvii. 545.) 

" TJre — use. Skinner thinks it a contraction of usura. 
It is frequent in Chaucer. Todd gives examples from 
Hooker and L'Estrange." The word is common enough, 
but how Mr. Hooper could seriously quote good old 
Skinner for such an etymology we cannot conceive. It 
does not mean " in use," but " to work," being merely 
the English form of en oeuvre, as " manure " is of ma- 
nceuvrer. 

" So troop-meal Troy pursued a while." (II. xvii. 634.) 

" Troop-meal — in troops, troop by troop. So piece- 
meal. To meal was to mingle, mix together ; from the 
French meler The reader would do well to con- 
sult Dr. Jamieson's excellent ' Dictionary of the Scottish 
Language ' in voce ' melV " No doubt the reader might 
profit by consulting it under any other word beginning 
with M, and any of them would be as much to the pur- 
pose as mell. Troop-meal, like inch-meal, piece-meal, im- 
plies separation, not mingling, and is from a Teutonic 
root. Mr. Hooper is always weak in his linguistic. 
In a note on II. xviii. 144, he informs us that "To sterve 
is to die ; and the sense of starve, with cold or hunger 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 335 

originated in the 17th century." We would it had! 
But we suspect that men had died of both these diseases 
earlier. What he should have said was that the restric- 
tion of meaning to dying with hunger was modern. 

II. xx. 239 we have " the God's " for " the Gods' " and 
a few lines below " Anchisiades' " for " Anchisiades's " ; 
11. xxi. 407, "press'd" for " prest." 

We had noted a considerable number of other slips, 

but we will mention only two more. " Treen broches " 

is explained to mean "branches of trees." (Hymn to 

Hermes, 227.) It means " wooden spits." In the 

Bacchus (28, 29) Mr. Hooper restores a corrupt reading 

which Mr. Singer (for a wonder) had set right. He 

prints, — 

" Nay, which of all the Pow'r fully-divined 
Esteem ye him?" 

Of course it should be powerfully-divined, for otherwise 
we must read " Pow'rs." The five volumes need a very 
careful revision in their punctuation, and in another edi- 
tion we should advise Mr. Hooper to strike out every 
note in which he has been tempted into etymology. 

We come next to Mr. W. C. Hazlitt's edition of Love- 
lace. Three short pieces of Lovelace's have lived, and 
deserved, to live : "To Lucasta from Prison," " To Lu- 
casta on going to the Wars," and " The Grasshopper." 
They are graceful, airy, and nicely finished. The last 
especially is a charming poem, delicate in expression, 
and full of quaint fancy, which only in the latter half is 
strained to conceit. As the verses of a gentleman they 
are among the best, though not of a very high order as 
poetry. He is to be classed with the lucky authors who, 
without great powers, have written one or two pieces so 
facile in thought and fortunate in phrase as to be carried 
lightly in the memory, poems in which analysis finds lit- 



336 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

tie, but which are charming in their frail completeness. 
This faculty of hitting on the precise lilt of thought and 
measure that shall catch the universal ear and sing them- 
selves in everybody's memory, is a rare gift. We have 
heard many ingenious persons try to explain the cling of 
such a poem as " The Burial of Sir John Moore," and 
the result of all seemed to be, that there were certain 
verses that were good, not because of their goodness, but 
because one could not forget them. They have the 
great merit of being portable, and we have to carry so 
much luggage through life, that we should be thankful 
for what will pack easily and take up no room. 

All that Lovelace wrote beside these three poems is 
utterly worthless, mere chaff from the threshing of his 
wits. Take out the four pages on which they are 
printed, and we have two hundred and eighty -nine left 
of the sorriest stuff that ever spoiled paper. The poems 
are obscure, without anything in them to reward perse- 
verance, dull without being moral, and full of conceits so 
far-fetched that we could wish the author no worse fate 
than to carry them back to where they came from. We 
are no enemies to what are commonly called conceits, 
but authors bear them, as heralds say, with a difference. 
And a terrible difference it is ! With men like Earle, 
Donne, Filler, Butler, Marvell, and even Quarles, con- 
ceit means wit ; they would carve the merest cherry- 
stone of thought in the quaintest and delicatest fashion. 
But with duller and more painful writers, such as Gas- 
coyne, Marston, Felltham, and a score of others, even 
with cleverer ones like Waller, Crashawe, and Suckling, 
where they insisted on being fine, their wit is conceit. 
Difficulty without success is perhaps the least tolerable 
kind of writing. Mere stupidity is a natural failing ; 
we skip and pardon. But the other is Dulness in a 
domino, that travesties its familiar figure, and lures us 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 337 

only to disappoint. These unhappy verses of Lovelace's 
had been dead and lapt in congenial lead these two hun- 
dred years ; — what harm had they done Mr. Hazlitt that 
he should disinter them 1 There is no such disenchant- 
er of peaceable reputations as one of these resurrection- 
men of literature, who w T ill not let mediocrities rest in 
the grave, where the kind sexton, Oblivion, had buried 
them, but dig them up to make a profit on their lead. 

Of all Mr. Smith's editors, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt 
is the worst. He is at times positively incredible, 
worse even than Mr. Halliwell, and that is saying a 
good deal. Worthless as Lovelace's poems were, they 
should have been edited correctly, if edited at all. Even 
dulness and dirtiness have a right to fair play, and to 
be dull and dirty in their own way. Mr. Hazlitt has 
allowed all the misprints of the original (or by far the 
greater part of them) to stand, but he has ventured on 
many emendations of the text, and in every important 
instance has blundered, and that, too, even where the 
habitual practice of his author in the use of words might 
have led him right. The misapprehension shown in some 
of his notes is -beyond the belief of any not familiar 
with the way in which old books are edited in Eng- 
land by the job. We have brought a heavy indictment, 
and we proceed to our proof, choosing only cases where 
there can be no dispute. We should premise that Mr. 
Hazlitt professes to have corrected the punctuation. 

" And though he sees it full of Avounds, 
Cruel one, still he wounds it. (p. 34.) 

Here the original reads, " Cruel still on," and the only 
correction needed was a comma after " cruel." 

" And by the glorious light 
Of both those stars, which of their spheres bereft, 
Only the jelly 's left." (p. 41.) 

The original has M of which," and rightly, for " their 
15 v 



338 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

spheres bereft " is parenthetic, and the sense is " of 
■which only the jelly 's left." Lovelace is speaking of the 
eyes of a mistress who has grown old, and his image, con- 
fused as it is, is based on the belief that stars shooting 
from their spheres fell to the earth as jellies, — a belief, 
by the way, still to be met with in New England. 

Lovelace, describing a cow (and it is one of the few 
pretty passages in the volume), says, — 

" She was the largest, goodliest beast 
That ever mead or altar blest, 
Round as her udder, and more white 
Than is the Milky-Way in night." (p. 64.) 

Mr. Hazlitt changes to " Round was her udder," thus 
making that white instead of the cow, as Lovelace in- 
tended. On the next page we read, — 

" She takes her leave o' th 1 mournful neat, 
Who, by hertoucht, now prizeth her life, 
Worthy alone the hollowed knife." 

Compare Chapman (Iliads, xviii. 480) : — 

" Slew all their white fleec'd sheep and neat" 

The original was " prize their life," and the use of 
" neat " as a singular in this way is so uncommon, if 
not unprecedented, and the verse as corrected so halt- 
ing, that we have no doubt Lovelace so wrote it. Of 
course "hollowed" should be "hallowed," though the 
broader pronunciation still lingers in our country pul- 
pits. 

" What need she other bait or charm 
But look ? or angle but her arm ? " (p. 65.) 

So the original, which Mr. Hazlitt, missing the sense, 
has changed to " what hook or angle." 

" Fly Joy on wings of Popinjays 
To courts of fools where as your plays 
Die laugh t at and forgot." (p. 67.) 

The original has " there." Read, — 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 339 

w Fly, Joy, on wings of popinjays 
To courts of fools ; there-, as your plays, 
Die," &c. 

" Where as," as then used, would make it the " plays " 
that were to die. 

" As he Lucasta nam'd, a groan 
Strangles the fainting passing tone; 
But as she heard, Lucasta smiles, 
Posses her round; she's slipt meanwhiles 
Behind the blind of a thick bush." (p. 68.) 

Mr. Hazlitt's note on " posses " could hardly be matched 
by any member of the posse comitatus taken at ran- 
dom : — 

u This word does not appear to have any very exact 
meaning. See Halliwell's Dictionary of Archaic Words, art. 
Posse, and Worcester's Diet, ibid., &o. The context here 
requires to turn sharply or quickly. 11 

The "ibid., <fcc." is delightful; in other words, "find 
out the meaning of p>osse for yourself." Though dark to 
Mr. Hazlitt, the word has not the least obscurity in it. 
It is only another form of push, nearer the French 
pousser, from Latin j^sare, and "the context here re- 
quires " nothing more than that an editor should read a 
poem if he wish to understand it. The plain meaning 

is, — 

" But, as she heard Lucasta, smiles 
Possess her round." 

That is, when she heard the name Lucasta, — for thus 
far in the poem she has passed under the pseudonyme 
of Amarantha. " Possess her round " is awkward, but 
mildly so for Lovelace, who also spells " commandress " 
in the same way with a single s. Process is spelt jyrosses 
in the report of those who absented themselves from 
Church in Stratford. 

" thou, that swing'st upon the waving eare, 
Of some well-filled oaten beard." (p. 94.) 



340 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Mr. Hazlitt, for some inscrutable reason, has changed 
"haire" to "eare" in the first line, preferring the ear 
of a beard to its hair ! 
Mr. Hazlitt prints, — 

" Poor verdant fooie ! and now green ice, thy joys 
Large and as lasting as thy peirch of grass, 
Bid us lay in 'gainst winter raine and poize 
Their flouds with an o'erflowing glasse." (p. 95.) 

Surely we should read : — 

" Poor verdant foole and now green ice, thy joys, 
Large and as lasting as thy perch of grass, 
Bid," &c. 

i. e. " Poor fool now frozen, the shortness of thy joys, 
who mad'st no provision against winter, warns us to do 
otherwise." 

" The radiant gemme was brightly set 
In as divine a carkanet; 
Of which the clearer was not knowne 
Her minde or her complexion." (p. 101.) 

The original reads rightly "for which," &c, and, the 
passage being rightly pointed, we have, — 

" For which the clearer was not known, 
Her mind or her complexion." 

Of course " complexion " had not its present limited 

meaning. 

" . . . . my future daring bayes 
Shall bow itself." (p. 107.) 

" We should read themselves," says Mr. Hazlitt's note 
authoritatively. Of course a noun ending in s is plural ! 
Not so fast. In spite of the dictionaries, hays was often 
used in the singular. 

" Do plant a sprig of cypress, not of bays," 
says Robert Randolph in verses prefixed to his brother's 
poems ; and Felltham in " Jonsonus Virbius," 

" A greener bays shall crown Ben Jonson's name." 
But we will cite Mr. Ikvyes himself: — 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 341 

" And, Avhere he took it up, resigns the bays." 

" But we (defend us!) are divine, 

[Not] female, but madam born, and come 
From a right-honorable wombe." (p. 115.) 

Here Mr. Hazlitt has ruined both sense and metre by 
his unhappy " not." We should read " Female, but 
madam-born," meaning clearly enough " we are women, 
it is true, but of another race." 

" In every hand [let] a cup be found 
That from all hearts a health may sound." (p. 121.) 

Wrong again, and the inserted "let" ruinous to the meas- 
ure. Is it possible that Mr. Hazlitt does not understand 
so common an English construction as this % 

" First told thee into th' ayre, then to the ground." (p. 141.) 

Mr. Hazlitt inserts the " to," which is not in the original, 
from another version. Lovelace wrote " ayer." We 
have noted two other cases (pp. 203 and 248) where he 
makes the word a dissyllable. On the same page we 
have " shewe's " changed to " shew " because Mr. Hazlitt 
did not know it meant " show us " and not " shows." On 
page 170, "their" is substituted for "her," which re- 
fers to Lucasta, and could refer to nothing else. 

Mr. Hazlitt changes " quarrels the student Mercury " 
to " quarrels with," not knowing that quarrels was once 
used as a transitive verb. (p. 189.) 

Wherever he chances to notice it, Mr. Hazlitt changes 
the verb following two or more nouns connected by an 
"and " from singular to plural. For instance : — 

" You, sir, alone, fame, and all conquering rhyme 
File the set teeth," &c. (p. 224.) 

for "files." Lovelace commonly writes so ; — on p. 181, 
•where it escaped Mr. Hazlitt's grammatical eye, we 
find, — 

" But broken faith, and th' cause of it, 
All damning gold, was damned to the pit." 



342 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Indeed, it was usual with writers of that day. Milton 
in one of his sonnets has, — 

" Thy worth and skill exempts thee from the throng," — 
and Leigh Hunt, for the sake of the archaism, in one of 
his, " Patience and Gentleness is power." 

Weariness, and not want of matter, compels us to 
desist from further examples of Mr. Hazlitt's emenda- 
tions. But we must also give a few specimens of his 
notes, and of the care with which he has corrected the 
punctuation. 

In a note on- "flutes of canary" (p. 76) too long to 
quote, Mr. Hazlitt, after citing the glossary of Nares 
(edition of 1859, by Wright and Halliwell, a very care- 
less book, to speak mildly), in which flute is conjectured 
to mean cask, says that he is not satisfied, but adds, 
" I suspect that a flute of canary was so called from 
the cask having several vent-holes." But flute means 
simply a tall glass. Lassel, describing the glass-making 
fit Murano, says, " For the High Dutch they have high 
glasses called Flutes, a full yard long." So in Dryden's 
Sir Martin Mar-all, " bring two flute-basses and some 
stools, ho ! We '11 have the ladies' health." The origin 
pf the word, though doubtful, is probably nearer to flood 
than flute. But conceive of two gentlemen, members of 
one knows not how many learned societies, like Messrs. 
Wright and Halliwell, pretending to edit Nares, when 
they query a word w^hich they could have found in any 
French or German dictionary ! 

On page 93 we have, — 

" Hayle ; holy cold ! chaste temper, hayle ! the fire 
Raved o'er my purer thoughts I feel t' expire." 

Mr. Hazlitt annotates thus : " Rarfd seems here to be 
equivalent to reavd or bereav'd. Perhaps the correct 
reading may be 'reav'd.' See Worcester's Dictionary, 
art. ilAjJa, where Menage's supposition of affinity be- 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 343 

tween rave and bereave is perhaps a little too slightingly 
treated." 

The meaning of Lovelace was, " the fire that raved." 
But what Mr. Hazlitt would make with " reaved o'er my 
purer thoughts," we cannot conceive. On the whole, we 
think he must have written the note merely to make his 
surprising glossological suggestion. All that Worcester 
does for the etymology, by the way, is to cite Richard- 
son, no safe guide. 

" Where now one so so spatters, t'other: no! " (p. 112.) 

The comma in this verse has, of course, no right there, 
but Mr. Hazlitt leaves the whole passage so corrupt that 
we cannot spend time in disinfecting it. We quote it 
only for the sake of his' note on " so so." It is marvel- 
lous. 

" An exclamation of approval when an actor made a hit. 
The corruption seems to be somewhat akin to the Italian, ' si, 
si, 1 a corruption of ' sia, sia." 1 " 

That the editor of an English poet need not under- 
stand Italian we may grant, but that he should not 
know the meaning of a phrase so common in his own 
language as so-so is intolerable. Lovelace has been say- 
ing that a certain play might have gained applause un- 
der certain circumstances, but that everybody calls it 
so-so, — something very different from " an exclamation 
of approval," one should say. The phrase answers 
exactly to the Italian cosl cost, while si (not si) is derived 
from sic, and is analogous with the affirmative use of the 
German so and the Yankee jes' so. 

" Oh, how he" hast'ned death, burnt to be fryed! " (p. 141.) 
The note on fryed is, — 

" I. e. freed. Free and freed were sometimes pronounced 
like fry and fryed; for Lord North, in his Forest of Varieties, 
16-15, has these lines : — 



344 LIBKAKY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

' Birds that long have lived free, 
Caught and cag'd, but pine and die.' 

Here evidently free is intended to rhyme with die." 

" Evidently ! " An instance of the unsafeness of 
rhyme as a guide to pronunciation. It was die that had 
the sound of dee, as everybody (but Mr. Hazlitt) knows. 
Lovelace himself rhymes die and she on p. 269. But 
what shall we say to our editor's not knowing that fry 
was used formerly where we should say burn ? Lovers 
used to fry with love, whereas now they have got out of 
the frying-pan into the fire. In this case a martyr is 
represented as burning (i. e. longing) to be fried (i. e. 
burned). 

" Her beams ne'er shed or change like th' hair of day." (p. 224.) 
Mr. Hazlitt's note is, — 

" Hair is here used in what has become quite an obsolete 
sense. The meaning is outward form, nature, or character. 
The word used to be by no means uncommon; but it is now, 
as was before remarked, out of fashion ; and indeed I do not 
think that it is found even in any old writer used exactly in 
the way in which Lovelace has employed it." 

We should think not, as Mr. Hazlitt understands it ! 
Did he never hear of the golden hair of Apollo, — of the 
intonsum Cynthium ? Don Quixote w r as a better scholar 
where he speaks of las dorados hebras de sus hermosos 
cabellos. But hair never meant what Mr. Hazlitt says it 
does, even when used as he supposes it to be here. It 
had nothing to do with " outward form, nature, or 
character," but had a meaning much nearer what we 
express by temperament, which its color was and is 
thought to indicate. 

On p. 232 " ivild ink " is explained to mean " unre- 
fined" It is a mere misprint for " vild." 

Page 237, Mr. Hazlitt, explaining an illusion of Love- 
lace to the "east and west" in speaking of George 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 345 

Sandys, mentions Sandys' s Oriental travels, but seems 
not to know that he translated Ovid in Virginia. 
Pages 251, 252 : — 

" And as that soldier conquest doubted not, 
Who but one splinter had of Castriot, 
But would assault ev'n death, so strongly charmed, 
And naked oppose rocks, with this bone armed." 

Mr. Hazlitt reads his for this in the last verse, and his 
note on " bone " is : — 

" And he found a new jawbone of an ass, and put forth 
his hand and took it, and slew a thousand men therewith. 
(Judges xv. 15.) " 

Could the farce of " editing " go further 1 To make a 
"splinter of Castriot" an ass's jawbone is a little too 
bad. We refer Mr. Hazlitt to " The Life of George Cas- 
triot, King of Epirus and Albania," &c, &c., (Edinburgh, 
1753,) p. 32, for an explanation of this profound diffi- 
culty. He will there find that the Turkish soldiers wore 
relics of Scanderbeg as charms. 

Perhaps Mr. Hazlitt's most astounding note is on the 
word pickear. (p. 203.) 

" So within shot she doth pickear, 
Now gall's [galls] the flank and now the rear." 

" In the sense in which it is here used this word seems to 
be peculiar to Lovelace. To jiickear, or pickeer, means to 
skirmish." And, pray, what other possible meaning can 
it have here 1 

Of his corrections of the press we will correct a few 
samples. 

Page 34, for " Love nee're his standard," read " neere" 
Page 82, for " fall too" read " fall to " (or, as we ought to 
print such words, " fall-to "). Page 83, for " star-made 
firmament," read "star, made firmament." Page 161, 
for " To look their enemies in their hearse," read, both 
for sense and metre, into. Page 176, for "the gods have 
15* 



346 LIBttAlvV OF OLD AUTHORS. 

kneeled," read had. Page 182, for ''In beds they turn" 
bled off their own," read of. Page 184, for "in mine 
one monument I lie," read owne. Page 212, for "Deu- 
calion's bktcMLung stone," read "backnung." Of the 
punctuation we shall give but one specimen, and that a 
fair average one : — 

" Naso to his Tibullus flung the wreath, 
He to Catullus thus did each bequeath. 
This glorious circle, to another round, 
At last the temples of a god it bound." 

Our readers over ten years of age will easily correct this 
for themselves. 

Time brings to obscure authors* an odd kind of repa- 
ration, an immortality, not of love and interest and ad- 
miration, but of curiosity merely. In proportion as 
their language w T as uncouth, provincial, or even barba- 
rous, their value becomes the greater. A book of which 
only a single copy escaped its natural enemies, the pas- 
try-cook and trunk-maker, may contain one word that 
makes daylight in some dark passage of a great author, 
and its name shall accordingly live forever in a note. Is 
not, then, a scholiastic athanasy better than none 1 And 
if literary vanity survive death, or even worse, as Bru- 
netto Latini's made him insensible for a moment to the 
rain of fire and the burning sand, the authors of such 
books as are not properly literature may still comfort 
themselves with a non omnis moria?', laying a mournful 
emphasis on the adjective, arid feeling that they have 
not lived wholly in vain while they share with the dodo 
a fragmentary continuance on earth. To be sure, the 
immortality, such as it is, belongs less to themselves 
than to the famous men they help to illustrate. If they 
escape oblivion, it is by a back door, as it were, and they 

* Early Popular Poetry. Edited by W. Carew Hazlitt. 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 347 

survive only in fine print at the page's foot. At the 
banquet of fame they sit below the salt. After all, per- 
haps, the next best thing to being famous or infamous 
is to be utterly forgotten, for this also is to achieve a 
kind of definite result by living. To hang on the peril- 
ous edge of immortality by the nails, liable at any mo- 
ment to drop into the fathomless ooze of oblivion, is at 
best a questionable beatitude. And yet sometimes the 
merest barnacles that have attached themselves to the 
stately keels of Dante or Shakespeare or Milton have 
an interest of their own by letting us know in what re- 
mote waters those hardy navigators went a pearl-fishing. 
Has not Mr. Dyce traced Shakespeare's "dusty death" 
to Anthony Copley, and Milton's ''back resounded 
Death ! " to Abraham Fraunce ] Nay, is it not Bernard 
de Ventadour's lark that sings forever in the diviner air 
of Dante's Paradise 1 

" Quan vey laudeta mover 
De joi sas alas contra'l rai, 
Que s'oblida e s laissa cazer 
Per la doussor qu 'al cor li 'n vai." 

" Qual lodoletta che in aere si spazia, 
Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta 
DelP ultima dolcezza che la sazia." 

We are not sure that Bernard's " Que s'oblida e s 
laissa cazer " is not sweeter than Dante's " tace conten- 
ta," but it was plainly the doussor that gave its cue to 
the greater poet's memory, and he has improved on it 
with that exquisite ultima, as his master Virgil some- 
times did on Homer. 

But authors whose interest for us is mainly biblio- 
graphic belong rather in such collections as Mr. Alli- 
bone's. As literature they are oppressive ; as items of 
literary history they find their place in that vast list 
which records not only those named for promotion, but 
also the killed, wounded, and missing in the Battle of 



348 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

the Books. There our hearts are touched with some- 
thing of the same vague pathos that dims the eye in 
some deserted graveyard. The brief span of our earthly 
immortalities is brought home to us us nowhere else. 
What a necrology of notability ! How many a contro- 
versialist, terrible in his day, how many a rising genius 
that somehow stuck on the horizon, how many a wither- 
ing satirist, lies here shrunk all away to the tombstone 
brevity of a name and date ! Think of the aspirations, 
the dreams, the hopes, the toil, the confidence (of him- 
self and wife) in an impartial and generous posterity, — ■ 
and then read "Smith J. [ohn ?] 1713-1784 (?). The 
Vision of Immortality, an Epique Poem in twelve books, 
1740, 4to. See Loivndes." The time of his own death 
less certain than that of his poem, (which we may fix 
pretty safely in 1740,) and the only posterity that took 
any interest in him the indefatigable compiler to whom 
a name was valuable in proportion as it was obscure. 
Well, to have even so much as your title-page read after 
it has rounded the corner of its first century, and to 
enjoy a posthumous public of one is better than nothing. 
This is the true Valhalla of Mediocrity, the Libro (Foro 
of the onymi-anonymi, of the never-named authors who 
exist only in name." Parson Adams would be here had 
he found a printer for his sermons, and Mr. Primrose, 
if a copy existed of his tracts on monogamy. Papyror- 
cetes junior will turn here with justifiable pride to the 
name of his respectable progenitor. Here we are secure 
of perpetuity at least, if of nothing better, and are 
sons though we may not be heirs, of fame. Here is a 
handy and inexpensive substitute for the waxen imagines 
of the Roman patriciate, for those must have been in- 
convenient to pack on a change of lodgings, liable to 
melt in warm weather (even the elder Brutus himself 
might soften in the dog-days) and not readily salable 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 349 

unless to some novus homo willing to buy a set of ances- 
tors ready-made, as some of our own enthusiasts in gene- 
alogy are said to order a family-tree from the heraldic 
nurseryman, skilled to imp a slip of Scroggins on a 
stock of De Vere or Montmorenci. Fame, it should 
seem, like electricity, is both positive and negative, and 
if a writer mast be Somebody to make himself of perma- 
nent interest to the world at large, he must not less be 
Nobody to have his namelessness embalmed by M. Gue- 
rard. The benignity of Providence is nowhere more 
clearly to be seen than in its compensations. As there 
is a large class of men madly desirous to decipher cunei- 
form and other inscriptions, simply because of their il- 
legibility, so there is another class driven by a like irre- 
sistible instinct to the reprinting of unreadable books. 
Whether these have even a philologic value for us de- 
pends on the accuracy and learning bestowed upon them 
by the editor. 

For there is scarcely any rubbish-heap of literature out 
of which something precious may not be raked by the 
diligent explorer, and the late Mr. Dyce (since Gifford, 
the best editor of our literature of the Tudor and Jaco- 
bean periods) might well be called the Golden Dustman, 
so many were the precious trifles sifted out by his intel- 
ligent industry. It would not be easy to name any 
work more thoroughly done than his edition of Skelton. 
He was not a philologist in the stricter sense, but no 
man had such a commonplace-book as he, or knew so ex- 
actly the meaning with which words were used during 
the period he did so much to illustrate. Elegant scholar- 
ship is not often, as in him, patient of drudgery and 
conscientious in painstaking. Between such a man and 
Mr. Carew Hazlitt the contrast is by no means agreeable. 
The one was not more distinguished by modest accuracy 
than the other is by the rash conceit of that half-knowl- 



350 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

edge which is more mischievous in an editor than down- 
right ignorance. This language is strong because it is 
true, though we should not have felt called upon to use 
it but for the vulgar flippancy with which Mr. Hazlitt 
alludes depreciatingly to the labors of his predecessors, 
— to such men as Eitson, Utterson, Wright, and Sir 
Frederick Madden, his superiors in everything that goes 
to the making of a good editor. Most of them are now 
dead and nailed in their chests, and it is not for us to 
forget the great debt we owe to them, and others like 
them, who first opened paths for us through the tangled 
wilderness of our early literature. A modern editor, 
with his ready-made helps of glossary, annotation, and 
comment, should think rather of the difficulties than 
the defects of these pioneers. 

How different is Mr. Hazlitt's spirit from that of the 
thorough and therefore modest scholar ! In the Preface 
to his Altenglische Sprachiwoben, Matzner says of an 
editor, das Beste was er ist verdanlt er Andern, an acci- 
dental pentameter that might seem to have dropped out 
of Nathan der Weise. Mr. Hazlitt would profit much by 
getting some friend to translate for him the whole para- 
graph in which it occurs. 

We see it announced that Mr. Hazlitt is to superin- 
tend a new edition of Warton's History of English 
Poetry, and are pained to think of the treatment that 
robust scholar and genial poet is likely to receive at 
the hands of an editor without taste, discrimination, or 
learning. Of his taste a single specimen may suffice. 
He tells us that " in an artistic and constructive point 
of view, the Mylner of Abington is superior to its prede- 
cessor," that predecessor being Chaucer's Reves Tale, 
which, with his usual inaccuracy, he assigns to the 
Miller ! Of his discrimination we have a sufficient test 
in the verses he has fathered upon Herrick in a late 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 351 

edition of the most graceful of our lyric poets. Perhaps 
discrimination is not, after all, the right word, for we 
have sometimes seen cause to doubt whether Mr. Hazlitt 
ever reads carefully the very documents he prints. For 
example, in the Biographical Notice prefixed to the 
Herrick he says (p. xvii) : " Mr. W. Perry Herrick has 
plausibly suggested that the payments made by Sir 
William to his nephew were simply on account of the 
fortune which belonged to Robert in right of his father, 
and which his uncle held in trust ; this was about £ 400 ; 
and I think from allusions in the letters printed else- 
where that this view may be the correct one." May be ! 
The poet says expressly, " I entreat you out of my little 
possession to deliver to this bearer the customarye £ 10, 
without which I cannot meate [f\ my ioyrney." The 
words we have italicized are conclusive. By the way, 
Mr. Hazlitt's wise-looking query after " meate " is con- 
clusive also as to his fitness for editorship. Did he 
never hear of the familiar phrase " to meet the expense " 1 
If so trifling a misspelling can mystify him, what must 
be the condition of his mind in face of the more than 
Protean travesties which words underwent before they 
were uniformed by Johnson and Walker 1 Mr. Hazlitt's 
mind, to be sure, like the wind Cecias, always finds its 
own fog. In another of Herri ck's letters we find, "For 
what her monie can be effected (sic) when there is di- 
uision 'twixt the hart and hand 1 ?" "Her monie" of 
course means harmonie, and effected is therefore right. 
What Mr. Hazlitt may have meant by his " (sic) " it 
were idle* to inquire. 

We have already had occasion to examine some of 
Mr. Hazlitt's work, and we are sorry to say that in the 
four volumes before us we find no reason for changing 
our opinion of his utter disqualification for the duties of 
editorship. He seldom clears up a real difficulty (never, 



352 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

we might say, with lights of his own), he frequently 
creates a darkness where none was before, and the pecu- 
liar bumptiousness of his incapacity makes it particularly 
offensive. We shall bring a few instances in proof of 
what we assert, our only embarrassment being in the 
superabundance of our material. In the Introduction to 
the second volume of his collection, Mr. Hazlitt speaks 
of " the utter want of common care on the part of pre- 
vious editors of our old poetry." Such oversights as he 
has remarked upon in his notes are commonly errors 
of the press, a point on which Mr. Hazlitt, of all men, 
should have been charitable, for his own volumes are 
full of them. We call his attention to one such which 
is rather amusing. In his " additional notes " we find 
"line 77, wylle. Strike out the note upon this word ; 
but the explanation is correct. Be wroght was a mis- 
print, however, for he wroght." The error occurs in a 
citation of three lines in which lother is still left for 
(other. The original note affords us so good an example 
of Mr. Hazlitt's style of editing as to be worth preserv- 
ing. In the " Kyng and the Hermit " we read, — 

" He ne wyst w[h]ere that he was 
Ne out of the forest for to passe, 
And thus lie rode all wylle." 

And here is Mr. Hazlitt's annotation on the word 
ivylle : — 

" i. e. evil. In a MS. of the Tale of the Basyn, sup- 
posed by Mr. Wright, who edited it in 1836, to be writ- 
ten in the Salopian dialect, are the following lines : — 

' The lother hade litull thoght, 
Off husbandry cowth he noght, 
But alle his wyves will be wroght.' " (Vol. I. p. 16.) 

It is plain that he supposed will, in this very simple pas- 
sage, to mean evil ! This he would seem to rectify, but 
at the same time takes care to tell us that " the expla- 



LIBEARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 353 

nation [of wylle] is correct." He is willing to give up 
one blunder, if only he may have one left to comfort 
himself withal ! Wylle is simply a rhyming fetch for 
wild, and the passage means that the king rode at ran- 
dom. The use of wild with this meaning is still com- 
mon in such phrases as " he struck wild." In " Have- 
lok " we find it in the nearly related sense of being at a 
loss, knowing not what to do : — 

" To lincolne barfot he yede 
Hwan he kam ther he -was ful wil, 
Ne hauede he no frend to gangen til." 

All wylle, in short, means the kind of editing that is 
likely to be done by a gentleman who picks up his mis- 
information as he goes along. We would hint that a 
person must know something before he can use even a 
glossary with safety. 

In the " King and the Barker," when the tanner finds 
out that it is the king whom he has been treating so 
familiarly, and falls upon his knees, Mr. Hazlitt prints, 

" He had no meynde of hes hode, nor cape, ne radell," 
and subjoins the following note : " Radell, or raddle, 
signifies a side of a cart ; but here, apparently, stands 
for the cart itself. Ritson printed ner adell." Mr. 
Hazlitt's explanation of raddle, which he got from Halli- 
well, is incorrect. The word, as its derivation (from 0. 
F. rastel) implies, means the side or end of a ha y-cavt, in 
which the uprights are set like the teeth of a rake. But 
what has a cart to do here 1 There is perhaps a touch 
of what an editor of old doggerel would benignantly call 
humor, in the tanner's forgetfulness of his raiment, 
but the cart is as little to the purpose as one of Mr. 
Hazlitt's own notes. The tanner was on horseback, as 
the roads of the period required that he should be, and 
good old Ritson was plainly on the right track in his 
reading, though his text was muddled by a misprint. 

w 



354 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

As it was, he got one word right, and so far has tho 
advantage of Mr. Hazlitt. The true reading is, of 
course, ner a dell, never a deal, not a whit. The very 
phrase occurs in another poem which Mr. Hazlitt has re- 
printed in his collection, — 

" For never a dell 
He wyll me love agayne." (Vol. III. p. 2.) 

That adell was a misprint in Ritson is proved by the fact 
that the word does not appear in his glossary. If we 
were to bring Mr. Hazlitt to book for his misprints ! In 
the poem we have just quoted he gravely prints, — 

*' Matter in dede, 
My sides did blede," 

for "mother, indede," "through ryght wysenes " for 
"though ryghtwisenes," "with man vnkynde " for "sith 
man vnkynde," "ye knowe a parte" for "ye knowe 
aperte," " here in " for " herein," all of which make non- 
sense, and all come within the first one hundred and 
fifty lines, and those of the shortest, mostly of four syl- 
lables each. Perhaps they rather prove ignorance than 
want of care. One blunder falling within the same 
limits we have reserved for special comment, because it 
affords a good example of Mr. Hazlitt's style of editing : — 

" Your herte souerayne 
Clouen in twayne 
By longes the blynde." (Vol. III. p. 7.) 

Here the uninstructed reader would be as completely in 
the dark as to what longes meant as the editor plainly 
was himself The old rhymer no doubt wrote Longis, 
meaning thereby Longinus, a personage familiar enough, 
one should think, to any reader of medieval poetry. 
Mr. Hazlitt absolves himself for not having supplied a 
glossary by the plea that none is needed by the class 
of readers for whom his volumes are intended. But this 
will hardly seem a valid excuse for a gentleman who 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 355 

often goes out of his way to explain in his notes such 
simple matters as that " shape " means " form," and that 
" Johan of the golden mouthe " means " St. Chrysostom," 
which, indeed, it does not, any more than Johannes Bap- 
tista means St. Baptist. We will supply Mr. Hazlitt 
with an illustration of the passage from Bekker's Fera- 
bras, the more willingly as it may direct his attention to 
a shining example of how an old poem should be 
edited : — 

" en la crotz vos pendero li fals Iuzieu truan, 
can Longis vos ferie de sa lansa trencan : 
el non avia vist en trastot son vivan ; 
lo sane li venc per l'asta entro al pnnh colan; 
e [el] toquet ne sos huelhs si vie el mantenan." 

Mr. Hazlitt, to be sure (who prints sang parlez for sanz 
parler) (Vol. I. p. 265), will not be able to form any no- 
tion of what these verses mean, but perhaps he will be 
able to draw an inference from the capital L that longes 
is a proper name. The word truan at the end of the first 
verse of our citation may also suggest to him that truant 
is not quite so satisfactory an explanation of the word 
trewdt as he seems to think. (Vol. IV. p. 24, note.) In 
deference to Mr. Hazlitt's presumed familiarity with an 
author sometimes quoted by him in his notes, we will 
point him to another illustration : — 

" Ac ther cam forth a knyght, 
With a kene spere y-grounde 
Highte Longeus, as the lettre telleth, 
And longe hadde lore his sighte." 

Piers Ploughman, Wright, p. 374. 

Mr. Hazlitt shows to peculiar advantage where old 
French is in question. Upon the word Osyll he favors 
us with the following note : " The blackbird. In East 
Cornwall ozell is used to signify the windpipe, and thence 
the bird may have had its name, as Mr. Couch has sug- 
gested to me." (Vol. II. p. 25.) Of course the black- 



356 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

bird, alone among fowls, is distinguished by a windpipe J 
The name is merely another form of 0. F. oisil, and was 
usurped naturally enough by one of the commonest 
birds, just as yxyaro (L. passer) in Spanish, by a similar 
process in the opposite direction, came to mean bird in 
general. On the very next page he speaks of " the Ro- 
mance which is vulgarly entitled Lybeaus Disconus, i. e. 
Le Beau Disconnu" If he had corrected Disconus to 
Desconus, all had been well ; but Disconnu neither is nor 
ever was French at all. Where there is blundering to 
be done, one stone often serves Mr. Hazlitt for two birds. 
Ly beaus Disconus is perfectly correct old French, and 
another form of the adjective (bins) perhaps explains the 
sound we give to the first s} T llable of beauty and Beau- 
fort. A barrister at law, as Mr. Hazlitt ?'s, may not be 
called on to know anything about old English or modern 
French, but we might fairly expect him to have at least 
a smattering of Law French ! In volume fourth, page 
129, a goodman trying his wife, 

" Bad her take the pot that sod oner the fire 
And set it abooue vpon the astire." 

Mr. Hazlitt's note upon astire is " hearth, i. q. astre." 
Knowing that the modern French was atre, he to</ 
rashly inferred a form which never existed except in 
Italian. The old French word is aistre or estre, but Mr. 
Hazlitt, as usual, prefers something that is neither old 
French nor new. We do not pretend to know what 
astire means, but a hearth that should be abooue the pot 
seething over the fire would be unusual, to say the least, 
in our semi-civilized country. 

In the "Lyfe of Koberte the Deuill" (Vol. I. p. 232), 
Mr. Hazlitt twice makes a knight sentre his lance, and 
tells us in a note that the "Ed. 1798 has /entered" a 
very easy misprint for the right word feutered. W T hat 
Mr. Hazlitt supposed to be the meaning of sentre he haa 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 357 

not vouchsafed to tell us. Fautre (sometimes fallre or 
feutre) means in old French the rest of a lance. Thus 
in the Roman du Renart (26517), 

" Et mist sa lance sor le fautre." 

But it also meant a peculiar kind of rest. In Sir F. 
Madden's edition of Gaivayne (to which Mr. Hazlitt 
refers occasionally) we read, 

" They f mired their lances, these knyghtes good "; 

and in the same editor's " William and the Werwolf," 

" With sper festened in feuter, him for to spille." 

In a note on the latter passage Sir F. Madden says, 
" There seems no reason, however, why it [feuter] should 
not mean the rest attached to the armour." But Roque- 
fort was certainly right in calling it a " garniture d'une 
selle pour tenir la lance." A spear fastened to the sad- 
dle gave more deadly w r eight to the blow. The "him 
for to spille " implies this. So in " Merlin " (E. E. Text 
Soc, p. 488) : " Than thei toke speres grete and rude, 
and putte hem in fewtre, and that is the grettest 
crewelte that oon may do, ffbr turnement oweth to be 
with-oute felonye, and they meved to smyte hem as in 
mortall w T erre." The context shows that the fewtre 
turned sport into earnest. A citation in Raynouard's 
Lexique Roman (though wrongly explained by him) di- 
rected us to a passage w T hich proves that this particular 
kind of rest for the lauce was attached to the saddle, in 
order to render the blow heavier : — 

" Lances a [lege as] argons afeutre*es 
Pour plus de dures colees rendre.' 1 '' 

Branche des Royaux Lignages, 4514, 4515. 

Mr. Hazlitt, as we have said, lets no occasion slip to 
insinuate the inaccuracy and carelessness of his pre- 
decessors. The long and useful career of Mr. Wright, 



358 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

who, if he had given ns nothing more than his excel- 
lent edition of " Piers Ploughman " and the volume of 
"Ancient Vocabularies," would have deserved the grati- 
tude of all lovers of our literature or students of our 
language, does not save him from the severe justice of 
Mr. Hazlitt, nor is the name of Warton too venerable to 
be coupled with a derogatory innuendo. Mr. Wright 
needs no plea in abatement from us, and a mischance of 
Mr. Hazlitt's own has comically avenged Warton. The 
word prayer, it seems, had somehow substituted itself 
for prat/se in a citation by Warton of the title of the 
" Schole-House of Women." Mr. Hazlitt thereupon 
takes occasion to charge him with often " speaking at 
random," and after suggesting that it might have been 
the blunder of a copyist, adds, "or it is by no means 
impossible that Warton himself, having been allowed 
to inspect the production, was guilty of this oversight." 
(Vol. IV. p. 98.) Now, on the three hundred and eigh- 
teenth page of the same volume, Mr. Hazlitt has allowed 
the following couplet to escape his conscientious atten- 
tion : — 

" Next, that no gallant should not ought suppose 
That prayers and glory doth consist in cloathes." 

Lege, nostro periculo, prayse ! W^ere dear old Tom still 
on earth, he might light his pipe cheerfully with any 
one of Mr. Hazlitt's pages, secure that in so doing he 
was consuming a brace of blunders at the least. The 
word p>rayer is an unlucky one for Mr. Hazlitt. In the 
"Knyght and his Wyfe" (Vol. II. p. 18) he prints: — 

" And sayd, Syre, T rede we make 
In this chapel oure prayers, 
That God us kepe both in ferrus." 

Why did not Mr. Hazlitt, who explains so many things 
that everybody knows, give us a note upon in ferrus ? 
It would have matched his admirable elucidation of 



LIBEAEY OF OLD AUTHORS. 359 

waygose, which we shall notice presently. Is it not 
barely possible that the MS. may have read prayere and 
in fere ? Prayere occurs two verses further on, and not 
as a rhyme. 

Mr. Hazlitt even sets Sir Frederick Madden right on 
a question of Old English grammar, telling him super- 
ciliously that can, with an infinitive, in such phrases as 
lie can go, is used not " to denote a past tense, but an 
imperfect tense." By past we suppose him to mean per- 
fect. But even if an imperfect tense were not a past 
one, we can show by a passage in one of the poems in 
this very collection that can, in the phrases referred 
to, sometimes not only denotes a past but a perfect 

tense : — 

" And thorow that worde y felle in pryde; 
As the aungelle can of hevyn glyde, 
And with the tywnkling* of an eye 
God for-dud alle that maystrye 
And so hath he done for my gylte." 

Now the angel here is Lucifer, and can of hevyn glyde 
means simply/* 5 // from heaven, not was falling. It is in 
the same tense as for-dud in the next line. The fall of 
the angels is surely a fait accompli. In the last line, by 
the way, Mr. Hazlitt changes "my for" to "for my," 
and wrongly, the my agreeing with maystrye under- 
stood. In modern English we should use mine in the 
same way. But Sir Frederick Madden can take care of 
himself. 

We have less patience with Mr. Hazlitt' s impertinence 
to Ritson, a man of ample reading and excellent taste 
in selection, and who, real scholar as he was, always 
drew from original sources. We have a foible for Ritson 
with his oddities of spelling, his acerb humor, his un- 
consciously depreciatory mister Tyrwhitts and mister 
Bryants, and his obstinate disbelief in Doctor Percy's 

* The careless Ritson would have printed this twynkling. 



360 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

folio manuscript. Above all, he was a most conscien- 
tious editor, and an accurate one so far as was possible 
with the lights of that day. Mr. Hazlitt has reprinted 
two poems, " The Squyr of Low Degre " and " The 
Knight of Curtesy," which had already been edited by 
Ritson. The former of these has passages that are un- 
surpassed in simple beauty by anything in our earlier 
poetry. The author of it was a good versifier, and Rit- 
son, though he corrected some glaring errors, did not 
deal so trenchantly with verses manifestly lamed by the 
copyist as perhaps an editor should.* Mr. Hazlitt says 
of liitson's text, that " it offers more than an hundred 
departures from the original," and of the "Knight of 
Courtesy," that " Ritson's text is by no means accurate." 
Now Mr. Hazlitt has adopted nearly all of Ritson's 
emendations, without giving the least hint of it. On 
the contrary, in some five or six instances, he gives the 
original reading in a foot-note with an " old ed. has " so 
and so, thus leaving the reader to infer that the correc- 
tions were his own. Where he has not followed Ritson, 
he has almost uniformly blundered, and that through 
sheer ignorance. For example, he prints, 

" Alas ! it tourned to wroth her heyle" 

where Ritson h \d substituted wrotherheyle. The meas- 
ure shows tiiat Ritson was right. Wroth her heyle, more- 
over, is nonsense. It should have been wrother her heijle 
at any rate, but the text is far too modern to admit of 
that archaic form. In the " Debate of the Body and the 
Soul " (Matzner's A. E. Sprachproben, 103) we have, 

* For example : — 

"And in the arber was a tre 
A fairer in the world might none be," 

should certainly read, 

" None fairer in the world might be." 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 361 

" Why schope thou me to wrother-hele," 
and in "Dame Sins" (Ibid., 110), 

" To goder hele ever came thou hider." 

Mr. Hazlitt prints, 

" For yf it may be found in thee 

• That thou them [de] fame for enuyte." 

The emendation [de] is Ritson's, and is probably right, 
though it would require, for the metre's sake, the elision 
of that at the beginning of the verse. But what is 
enuyte? Ritson reads enmyte, which is, of course, the 
true reading. Mr. Hazlitt prints (as usual either with- 
out apprehending or without regarding the sense), 

" With browes bent and eyes full mery," 

where Ritson has brent, and gives parallel passages in 
his note on the word. Mr. Hazlitt gives us 

" To here the bugles there yblow, 
With their bugles in that place," 

though Ritson had made the proper correction to begles. 
Mr. Hazlitt, with ludicrous nonchalance, allows the Squire 
to press into the throng 

" With a bastard large and longe, 11 

and that with the right word (baslarde) staring him in 
the face from Ritson's text. We wonder he did not give 
us an illustrative quotation from Falconbridge ! Both 
editors have allowed some gross errors to escape, such 
as " come not " for " come " (v. 425) ; " so leue he be " 
for "ye be " (v. 593) ; " vnto her chambre" for " vnto 
your" (v. 993) ; but in general Ritson's is the better 
and more intelligent text of the two. In the "Knight 
of Curtesy," Mr. Hazlitt has followed Ritson's text 
almost literatim. Indeed, it is demonstrable that he 
gave it to his printers as copy to set up from. The proof 
is this : Ritson has accented a few words ending in te. 
16 



362 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Generally he uses the grave accent, but now and then 
the acute. Mr. Hazlitt's text follows all these variations 
exactly. The main difference between the two is that 
Ritson prints the first personal pronoun i, and Mr. Haz- 
litt, I. liitson is probably right ; for in the " Schole- 
house of Women" (vv. 537, 538) where the text no 
doubt was 

" i [i. e. one] deuil a woman to speak may constrain, 
But all that in hel be cannot let it again," 

Mr. Hazlitt changes "i" to "A," and says in a note, 
" Old ed. has /." That by his correction he should miss 
the point was only natural ; for he evidently conceives 
that the sense of a passage does not in the least concern 
an editor. An instance or two will suffice. In the 
"Knyght and his Wyfe" (Vol. II. p. 17) we read, 

" The fynd tyl hure hade rnyche tene 
As hit was a sterfull we seme I " 

Mr. Hazlitt in a note explains tene to mean " trouble or 
sorrow " ; but if that were its meaning here, we should 
read made, and not hade, which would give to the word 
its other sense of attention. The last verse of the coup- 
let Mr. Hazlitt seems to think perfectly intelligible as it 
stands. We should not be surprised to learn that he 
looked upon it as the one gem that gave lustre to a poem 
otherwise of the dreariest. We fear we shall rob it of all 
its charm for him by putting it into modern English : — 
" As it was after full well seen." 

So in the " Smyth and his Dame " (Vol. III. p. 204) 

we read, 

" It were a lytele maystry 
To make a blynde man to se," 

instead of "as lytell." It might, indeed, be as easy to 
perform the miracle on a blind man as on Mr. Hazlitt. 
Again, in the same poem, a little further on, 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 363 

" For I tell the now trevely, 
Is none so wyse ne to sle, 
But ever ye may som what lere," 

which, of course, should be, 

" ne so sle 
But ever he may som what lere." 

Worse than all, Mr. Hazlitt tells us (Vol. I. p. 158) that 

when they bury the great Khan, they lay his body in a 

tabernacle, 

" With sheld and spere and other wede 
With a whit mere to gyf him in ylke." 

We will let Sir John Maundeville correct the last verse : 
" And they seyn that when he shale come into another 
World .... the mare schalle gheven him mylkP Mr. 
Hazlitt gives us some wretched doggerel by " Piers of 
Fulham," and gives it swarming with blunders. We 
take at random a couple of specimens : — 

" And loveship goith ay to warke 
Where that presence is put a bake," (Vol. II. pp. 13, 14,) 

where we should read " love's ship," " wrake," and 
" abake." Again, just below, 

" Ffor men haue seyn here to foryn, 
That love laughet when men be forsworn." 

Love should be "love." Ovid is the obscure person 
alluded to in the " men here to foryn " : 

" Jupiter e ccelo perjuria ridet amantum." 
We dare say Mr. Hazlitt, if he ever read the passage, 
took it for granted that " to foryn " meant too foreign, 
and gave it up in despair. But surely Shakespeare's 

" At lovers' perjuries, 
They say, Jove laughs," 

is not too foreign to have put him on the right scent. 

Mr. Hazlitt is so particular in giving us v for u and 
vice versa, that such oversights are a little annoying. 



364: LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

Every man his own editor seems to be his theory of the 
way in which old poetry should be reprinted. On this 
plan, the more riddles you leave (or make) for the reader 
to solve, the more pleasure you give him. To correct 
the blunders in any book edited by Mr. Hazlitt would 
give the young student a pretty thorough training in 
archaic English. In this sense the volumes before us 
might be safely recommended to colleges and schools. 
When Mr. Hazlitt undertakes to correct, he is pretty 
sure to go wrong. For example, in " Doctour Doubble 
Ale " (Vol. III. p. 309) he amends thus : — 

" And sometyme mikle strife is 
Among the ale wyfes, [y-wis] ; 

where the original is right as it stands. Just before, in 
the same poem, we have a parallel instance : — 

" And doctonrs dnlpatis 
That falsely to them pratis, 
And bring them to the gates." 

The original probably reads (or should read) ivyfis and 
gatis. But it is too much to expect of Mr. Hazlitt that 
he should remember the very poems he is editing from 
one page to another, nay, as we shall presently show, 
that he should even read them. He will change be into 
ben w T here he should have let it alone (though his own 
volumes might have furnished him with such examples 
as " were go," " have se," " is do," and fifty more), but 
he will sternly retain bene where the rhyme requires be, 
and Ritson had so printed. Tn " Adam Bel " the word 
pryme occurs (Vol. II. p. 140), and he vouchsafes us the 
following note : " i. e. noon. It is commonly used by 
early writers in this sense. In the Four P. P., by John 
Hey wood, circa 1540, the apothecaiy says 

'Tfhe taste fhis hnxp nve nbon f e the pryme 
By the masse, he is in heven or even songe tyme.' " 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 365 

Let our readers admire with us the easy "it is com- 
monly used " of Mr. Hazlitt, as if he had store of other 
examples in his note-book. He could an if he would ! 
But unhappily he borrowed this single quotation from 
Nares, and, as usual, it throws no scintilla of light upon 
the point in question, for his habit in annotation is to 
find by means of a glossary some passage (or passages if 
possible) in which the word to be explained occurs, and 
then — why, then to give the word as an explanation of 
itself. But in this instance, Mr. Hazlitt, by the time he 
had reached the middle of his next volume (Vol. III. 
p. 281) had wholly forgotten Mh&t 2>ryme was "commonly 
used by early writers " for noon, and in a note on the fol- 
lowing passage, 

" I know not whates a clocke 
But by the countre cocke, 
The mone nor yet the pryme, 
Vntyll the sonne do shyne," 

he informs us that it means " six o'clock in the mom- 
mo- " I Here a°;ain this editor, who taxes Bitson with 
want of care, prints mone for none in the very verse he 
is annotating, and which we may therefore presume 
that he had read. A man who did not know the moon 
till the sun showed it him is a match even for Mr. Haz- 
litt himself. We wish it were as easy as he seems to 
think it to settle exactly what pryme means when used 
by our " early writers," but it is at least absolutely cer- 
tain that it did not mean noon. 

But Mr. Hazlitt, if these volumes are competent wit- 
nesses, knows nothing whatever about English, old or 
new. In the "Mery Jest of Dane Hew" he finds the 
following verses, 

" Dame he paid what shall we now doo 
Sir she said so mote go 
The munk in a comer ye shall lay " 



366 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

which we print purposely without punctuation. Mr. 
Hazlitt prints them thus, 

" Dame, he said, what shall we now doo? 
Sir, she said, so mote [it] go. 
The munk," &c., 

and gives us a note on the locution he has invented to 

this effect, " 1 so might it be managed." And the 

Chancellor said, / doubt I Mr. Hazlitt's query makes 

such a singular exception to his more natural mood of 

immediate inspiration that it is almost pathetic. The 

amended verse, as everybody (not confused by too great 

familiarity with our " early writers") knows, should 

read, 

" Sir, she said, so might I go," 

and should be followed only by a comma, to show its 
connection with the next. The phrase " so mote I go," 
is as common as a weed in the works of the elder poets, 
both French and English ; it occurs several times in Mr. 
Hazlitt's own collection, and its other form, " so mote I 
fare," which may also be found there, explains its mean- 
ing. On the phrase point-device (Vol. III. p. 117) Mr. 
Hazlitt has a positively incredible note, of which we 
copy only a part : " This term, which is commonly used 
in early poems " [mark once more his intimacy with our 
earlier literature] " to signify extreme exactitude, origi- 
nated in the points which were marked on the astrolabe, 
as one of the means which the astrologers and dabblers 
in the black art adopted to enable them (as they pre- 
tended) to read the fortunes of those by whom they were 
consulted in the stars and planetary orbs. The exces- 
sive precision which was held to be requisite in the 
delineation of these points " [the delineation of a point 
is good !] " &c. on the astrolabe, led to point-device, or 
points-device (as it is sometimes found spelled), being 
used as a proverbial expression for minute accuracy of 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 3G7 

any kind." Then follows a quotation from Gower, in 

which an astrolabe is spoken of " with points and cercles 

merveilous," and the note proceeds thus : " Shakespeare 

makes use of a similar figure of speech in the Tempest, 

I. 2, where the following dialogue takes place between 

Prospero and Ariel : — 

' Prosp. Hast thou, spirit, 
Performed to point the tempest that I bade thee ? 
Ar. In every article.' " 

Neither the proposed etymology nor the illustration 
requires any remark from us. We will only say that 
point-device is excellently explained and illustrated by 
Wedgwood. 

We will give a few more examples out of many to 
show Mr. Hazlitt's utter unfitness for the task he has 
undertaken. In the " Kyng and the Hermyt " are the 
following verses, 

" A wyld wey, I hold, it were 
The wey to wend, I you swere, 
Bot ye the dey may se," 

meaning simply, " I think it would be a wild thing (in 
you) to go on your way unless you wait for daylight." 
Mr. Hazlitt punctuates and amends thus : — 

" A wyld wey I hold it were, 
The wey to wend, I you swere, 
Ye hot [by] the dey may se." (Vol. I. p. 19.) 

The word hot seems a stumbling-block to Mr. Hazlitt. 
On page 54 of the same volume we have, 

" Herd i neuere bi no leuedi 
Hote hendinesse and curteysi." 

The use of the word by as in this passage would seem 
familiar enough, and yet in the " Hye Way to the 
Spittel Hous" Mr. Hazlitt explains it as meaning be. 
Any boy know T s that without sometimes means unless 
(Fielding uses it often in that sense), but Mr. Hazlitt 



368 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

seems unaware of the fact. In his first volume (p. 224) 
he gravely prints : — 

41 They trowed verelye that she shoulde dye ; 
With that our ladye wold her helpe and spede." 

The semicolon after dye shows that this is not a mis- 
print, but that the editor saw no connection between the 
first verse and the second. In the same volume (p. 
133) we have the verse, 

'' He was a grete tenement man, and ryche of londe and lede," 

and to lede Mr. Hazlitt appends this note : " Lede, in early 
English, is found in various significations, but here 
stands as the plural of lad, a servant." In what con- 
ceivable sense is it the plural of lad ? And does lad 
necessarily mean a servant ? The Promptorium has 
ladde glossed by garcio, but the meaning servant, as in 
the parallel cases of 7rai9, puer, gargon, and boy, was a 
derivative one, and of later origin. The word means 
simply man (in the generic sense) and in the plural peo- 
ple. So in the " Squyr of Low Degre," 

" I will forsake both land and lede" 
and in the " Smyth and his Dame," 

" That hath both land and lyth." 
The word was not " used in various significations." Even 
so lately as " Flodden Ffeild " we find, 

" He was a noble leed of high degree." 
Connected with land it was a commonplace in German 
as well as in English. So in the Tristan of Godfrey of 
Strasburg, 

„<rr 33ei>a(ct) fTn (it) t tmt>e ftn (ant 

#n ftncsf mavfcalfe£ l?am." 

Mr. Hazlitt is more nearly right than usual when he 
says that in the particular case cited above lede means 
servants. But w r ere these of only one sex 1 Does he not 
iknow that even in the middle of the last century when 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 3G9 

an English nobleman spoke of " my people," he meant 
simply his domestics 1 

Encountering the familiar phrase No do! (Vol. IV. 
p. 64), Mr. Hazlitt changes it to Not do ! He informs 
us that Goddes are (Vol. I. p. 197) means " God's heir" ! 
He says (Vol II. p. 146) : " To borrow, in the sense of 
to take, to guard, or to protect, is so common in early 
English that it is unnecessary to bring forward any illus- 
tration of its use in this way." But he relents, and 
presently gives us two from Ralph Roister Doister, each 
containing the phrase " Saint George to borrow ! " That 
barrow means take no owner of books need be told, and 
Mr. Hazlitt has shown great skill in borrowing other peo- 
ple's illustrations for his notes,- but the phrase he quotes 
has no such meaning as he gives it. Mr. Dyce in a note 
on Skelton explains it rightly, " St. George being my 
pledge or surety." 

We gather a few more of these flowers of exposition 
and etymology : — 

" The while thou sittest in chirche, thi bedys schalt thou bidde." 

(Vol. I. p. 181.) 

i. e. thou shalt offer thy prayers. Mr. Hazlitt's note 

on bidde is, " i. e. bead. So in The, Kyng and the Hermit, 

line 111: — 

• That herd an hermyte there within 
Unto the gate he gan to wyn 
Bedying his prayer.' " 

Precisely what Mr. Hazlitt understands by beading (or 
indeed by anything else) we shall not presume to divine, 
but we shoidd like to hear him translate " if any man 
bidde the worshyp," which comes a few lines further on. 
Now let us turn to page 191 of the same volume. 
" Maydenys ben loneliche and no thing sekir." Mr. 
Hazlitt tells us in a note that " sekir or sicker " is a 
very common form of secure, and quotes in illustration 
16* x 



370 LIBRAE Y OF OLD AUTHORS. 

from the prose Morte Arthure, " A ! said Sir Lauucelot, 
comfort yourselfe, for it shall bee unto us as a great 
honour, and much more then if we died in any other 
jjlaces : for of death wee be sicker." Now in the text 
the word means safe, and in the note it means sure. 
Indeed sure, which is only a shorter form of secure, is its 
ordinary meaning. " I mak sicker," said Kirkpatrick, a 
not unfitting motto for certain editors, if they explained 
it in their usual phonetic way. 

In the " Frere and the Boye," when the old mian has 
given the boy a bow, he says : — 

" Shote therin, whan thou good thynke; 
For yf thou shote and wynke, 
The prycke thow shalte hytte." 

Mr. Hazlitt's explanation of wynTce is "to close one eye 
in taking aim," and he quotes a passage from Gascoigne 
in support of it. Whatever Gascoigne meant by the 
word (which is very doubtful), it means nothing of the 
kind here, and is another proof that Mr. Hazlitt does 
not think it so important to understand what he reads 
as St. Philip did. What the old man said was, " even 
if you shut both your eyes, you can't help hitting the 
mark." So in " Piers Ploughman" (Whitaker's text), 

" Wynkyng. as it were, wytterly ich saw hyt." 

Again, for our editor's blunders are as endless as the 
heads of an old-fashioned sermon, in the " Schole-House 
of Women" (Vol. IV. p. 130), Mr. Hazlitt has a note on 
the phrase " make it nice," 

(" And yet alwaies they bible bable 
Of euery matter and make it nice,") 

which reads thus : " To make it pleasant or snug. I do 
not remember to have seen the word used in this sense 
very frequently. But Gascoigne has it in a precisely 
similar way : — 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 371 

' The glosse of gorgeous Courtes by thee did please mine eye, 
A stately sight me thought it was to see the braue go by, 
To see their leathers flaunte, to make [markelj their straunge deuise, 
To lie along in ladies lappes, to lispe, and make it nice.' " 

To make it nice means nothing more nor less than to 
play the fool, or rather, to make a fool of yourself, f aire le 
niais. In old English the French niais and nice, from 
similarity of form and analogy of meaning, naturally 
fused together in the word nice, which, by an unusual 
luck, has been promoted from a derogatory to a respect- 
ful sense. Gascoigne's lispe might have put Mr. Hazlitt 
on his guard, if he ever considered the sense of what he 
quotes. But he never does, nor of what he edits either. 
For example, in the " Smyth and his Dame " we find 
the following note : " Proive, or proffe, is not at all un- 
common as a form of profit. In the ' Seven Names of 
a Prison,' a poem printed in Reliquiae Antiquce, we 
have, — 

' Quintum nomen istius foveas ita probatum* 
A place oiproffiov man to know bothe frend and foo.' " 

Now 2 :)ro J' ft^d proiv are radically different words. Proff 
here means proof, and if Mr. Hazlitt had read the stanza 
which he quotes, he would have found (as in all the 
others of the same poem) the meaning repeated in Latin 
in the last line, probacio amicorum. 

But we wish to leave our readers (if not Mr. Hazlitt) 
in good humor, and accordingly we have reserved two 
of his notes as bonnes bouches. In " Adam Bel," when 
the outlaws ask pardon of the king, 

" They kneled downe without lettyng 
And each helde vp his hande." 

To this passage (tolerably plain to those not too familiar 
with "our early literature") Mr. Hazlitt appends this 
solemn note : ' To hold tip the hand was formerly a sign 
of respect or concurrence, or a mode of taking an oath ; 



372 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

and thirdly as a signal for mercy. In all these senses it 
has been employed from the most ancient times ; nor is it 
% w et out of practice, as many savage nations still testify 
their respect to a superior by holding their hand [either 
'heir hands or the hand, Mr. Hazlitt !] over their head. 
Touching the hat appears to be a vestige of the same 
custom. In the present passage the three outlaws may 
be understood to kneel on approaching the throne, and 
to hold up each a hand as a token that they desire to 
ask the royal clemency or favour. In the lines which are 
subjoined it [what X\ implies a solemn assent to an oath : 

i This swore the duke and all his men, 
And all the lordes that with him l.uid, 
And tharto to* held they up thaire hand.' " 

Minot's Poems, ed. 1825, p. 9. 

The admirable Tupper could not have done better than 
this, even so far as the mere English of it is concerned. 
Where all is so fine, we hesitate to declare a preference, 
but, on the whole, must give in to the passage about 
touching the hat, which is as good as " mobbled queen." 
The Americans are still among the "savage nations'* 
who " imply a solemn assent to an oath " by holding 
up the hand. Mr. Hazlitt does not seem to know that 
the question whether to kiss the book or hold up the 
hand was once a serious one in English politics. 

But Mr. Hazlitt can do better even than this 1 ! Our 
readers may be incredulous ; but we shall proceed to 
show that he can. In the " Schole-House of Women," 
among much other equally delicate satire of the other 
sex (if we may venture still to call them so), the satirist 
undertakes to prove that woman was made, not of the 
rib of a man, but of a dog : — 

* The to is, we need not par, 81 addition cf Mr. Fazlitt's. What 
faith can we put in the text ot a man who so often copies even his 
quotations inaccurately? 



LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 373 

" And yet the rib, as I suppose, 
That God did take out of the man 
A dog vp caught, and a way gose 
Eat it clene, so that as than 
The woork to finish that God began 
Could not be, as we haue said, 
Because the dog the rib conuaid. 

A remedy God found as yet; 
Out of the dog he took a rib." 

Mr. Hazlitt has a long note on way gose, of which the 

first sentence shall suffice us : " The origin of the term 

way-goose is involved in some obscurity." We should 

think so, to be sure ! Let us modernize the spelling and 

grammar, and correct the punctuation, and then see how 

it looks : — 

" A dog up caught and away goes, 
Eats it up." 

We will ask Mr. Hazlitt to compare the text, as he 
prints it, with 

" Into the hall he gose." (Vol. III. p. 67.) 

We should have expected a note here on the " hall he- 
goose." Not to speak of the point of the joke, such as 
it is, a goose that could eat up a man's rib could only 
be matched by one that could swallow such a note, — or 
write it ! 

We have made but a small florilegium from Mr. Haz- 
litt's remarkable volumes. His editorial method seems 
to have been to print as the Lord would, till his eye was 
caught by some word he did not understand, and then to 
make the reader comfortable by a note showing that the 
editor is as much in the dark as he. We are profoundly 
thankful for the omission of a glossary. It would have 
been a nursery and seminary of blunder. To expose pre- 
tentious charlatanry is sometimes the unpleasant duty of 
a reviewer. It is a duty we never seek, and should not 
have assumed in this case but for the impertinence with 



374 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 

which Mr. Hazlitt has treated dead and living scholars, 
the latchets of whose shoes he is not worthy to unloose, 
and to express their gratitude to whom is, or ought to be, 
a pleasure to all honest lovers of their mother-tongue. 
If he who has most to learn be the happiest man, Mr. 
Hazlitt is indeed to be envied ; but we hope he will 
learn a great deal before he lays his prentice hands on 
Warton's " History of English Poetry," a classic in its 
own way. If he does not learn before, he will be likely 
to learn after, and in no agreeable fashion. 



EMERSON THE LECTURER. 



IT is a singular fact, that Mr. Emerson is the most 
steadily attractive lecturer in America. Into that 
somewhat cold-waterish region adventurers of the sensa- 
tional kind come down now and then with a splash, to 
become disregarded King Logs before the next season. 
But Mr. Emerson always draws. A lecturer now for 
something like a third of a century, one of the pioneers 
of the lecturing system, the charm of his voice, his man- 
ner, and his matter has never lost its power over his 
earlier hearers, and continually winds new ones in its 
enchanting meshes. What they do not fully understand 
they take on trust, and listen, saying to themselves, as 
the old poet of Sir Philip Sidney, — 

"A sweet, attractive, kind of grace, 
A full assurance given by looks, 
Continual comfort in a face, 

The lineaments of gospel books." 

We call it a singular fact, because we Yankees are 
thought to be fond of the spread-eagle style, and noth- 
ing can be more remote from that than his. We are 
reckoned a practical folk, who would rather hear about 
a new air-tight stove than about Plato ; yet our favorite 
teacher's practicality is not in the least of the Poor 
Kichard variety. If he have any Buncombe constit- 
uency, it is that unrealized commonwealth of philoso- 
phers which Plotinus proposed to establish ; and if he 
were to make an almanac, his directions to farmers would 



376 EMERSON THE LECTURES. 

be something like this : " October : Indian Summer ; 
now is the time to get in your early Vedas." What, 
then, is his secret 1 Is it not that he out-Yankees us 
all 1 that his range includes us all ? that he is equally at 
home with the potato-disease and original sin, with peg- 
ging shoes and the Over-soul ? that, as we try all-trades, 
so has he tried all cultures? and above all, that his 
mysticism gives us a counterpoise to our super-practi- 
cality ] 

There is no man living to whom, as a writer, so many 
of us feel and thankfully acknowledge so great an in- 
debtedness for ennobling impulses, — none whom so 
many cannot abide. What does he mean? ask these 
last. W 7 here is his system? What is the use of it 
all ? What the deuse have we to do with Brahma ? 
I do not propose to write an essay on Emerson at this 
time. I will only say that one may find grandeur 
and consolation, in a starlit night without caring to 
ask what it means, save grandeur and consolation ; 
one may like Montaigne, as some ten generations be- 
fore us have done, without thinking him so systematic 
as some more eminently tedious (or shall we say te- 
diously eminent ?) authors ; one may think roses as 
good in their way as cabbages, though the latter would 
make a better show in the witness-box, if cross-examined 
as to their usefulness ; and as for Brahma, why, he can 
take care of himself, and won't bite us at any rate. 

The bother w T ith Mr. Emerson is, that, though he 
writes in prose, he is essentially a poet. If you under- 
take to paraphrase what he says, and to reduce it to 
words of one syllable for infant minds, you will make as 
sad work of it as the good monk with his analysis of 
Homer in the " Epistoke Obscurorum Virorum." We 
look upon him as one of the few men of genius whom 
our age has produced, and there needs no better proof 



£MEESON THE LECTURER. 377 

of it than his masculine faculty of fecundating other 
minds. Search for his eloquence in his hooks and you 
will perchance miss it, but meanwhile you will find that 
it has kindled all your thoughts. For choice and pith 
of language he belongs to a better age than ours, and 
might rub shoulders with Fuller and Brow T ne, — though 
he does use that abominable word reliable. His eye 
for a fine, telling phrase that will carry true is like 
that of a backwoodsman for a rifle ; and he will dredge 
you up a choice word from the mud of Cotton Mather 
himself. A diction at once so rich and so homely as 
his I know not w r here to match in these days of writ- 
ing by the page ; it is like homespun cloth-of-gold. 
The many cannot miss his meaning, and only the few 
can find it. It is the open secret of all true genius. 
It is wholesome to angle in those profound pools, though 
one be rewarded w r ith nothing more than the leap of 
a fish that flashes his freckled side in the sun and as 
suddenly absconds in the dark and dreamy waters again. 
There is keen excitement, though there be no ponderable 
acquisition. If we cany nothing home in our baskets, 
there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated 
blood. What does he mean, quotha'? He means in- 
spiring hints, a divining-rod to your deeper nature. 
No doubt, Emerson, like all original men, has his pecu- 
liar audience, and yet I know none that can hold a 
promiscuous crowd in pleased attention so long as he. 
As in all original men, there is something for every 
palate. " Would you know," says Goethe, " the ripest 
cherries'? Ask the boys and the blackbirds." 

The announcement that such a pleasure as a new 
course of lectures by him is coming, to people as old as 
I am, is something like those forebodings of spring that 
prepare us every year for a familiar novelty, none the 
less novel, when it arrives, because it is familiar. We 



378 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 

know perfectly well what we are to expect from Mr. Em- 
erson, and yet what he says always penetrates and stirs 
us, as is apt to be the case with genius, in a very un- 
looked-for fashion. Perhaps genius is one of the few 
things which we gladly allow to repeat itself, — one of 
the few that multiply rather than weaken the force of 
their impression by iteration 1 Perhaps some of us hear 
more than the mere words, are moved by something 
deeper than the thoughts 1 If it be so, we are quite 
right, for it is thirty years and more of " plain living 
and high thinking " that speak to us in this altogether 
unique lay-preacher. We have shared in the beneficence 
of this varied culture, this fearless impartiality in criti- 
cism and speculation, this masculine sincerity, this sweet- 
ness of nature which rather stimulates than cloys, for a 
generation long. If ever there was a standing testi- 
monial to the cumulative power and value of Character', 
(and we need it sadly in these days,) we have it in this 
gracious and dignified presence. What an antiseptic 
is a pure life ! At sixty-five (or two years beyond his 
grand climacteric, as he would prefer to call it) he has 
that privilege of soul which abolishes the calendar, and 
presents him to us always the unwasted contemporary 
of his own prime. I do not know if he seem old to his 
younger hearers, but we who have known him so long 
wonder at the tenacity with which he maintains himself 
even in the outposts of youth. I suppose it is not the 
Emerson of 18G8 to whom we listen. For us the whole 
life of the man is distilled in the clear drop of every 
sentence, and behind each word we divine the force of a 
noble character, the weight of a large capital of think- 
ing and being. We do not go to hear what Emerson 
says so much as to hear Emerson. Not that we per- 
ceive any falling-off in anything that ever was essential 
to the charm of Mr. Emerson's peculiar style of thought 



EMERSON THE LECTURER 379 

or phrase. The first lecture, to be sure, was more dis- 
jointed even than common. It was as if, after vainly 
trying to get his paragraphs into sequence and order, he 
had at last tried the desperate expedient of shuffling 
them. It was chaos come again, but it was a chaos full 
of shooting-stars, a jumble of creative forces. The 
second lecture, on " Criticism and Poetry," was quite up 
to the level of old times, full of that power of strangely- 
subtle association whose indirect approaches startle the 
mind into almost painful attention, of those flashes of 
mutual understanding between speaker and hearer that 
are gone ere one can say it lightens. The vice of Em- 
erson's criticism seems to be, that while no man is so 
sensitive to what is poetical, few men are less sensible 
than he of what makes a poem. He values the solid 
meaning of thought above the subtler meaning of style. 
He would prefer Donne, I suspect, to Spenser, and some- 
times mistakes the queer for the original. 

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, 
*?ift of life ; yet there are some of us who would hardly 
consent to be young again, if it were at the cost of our 
recollection of Mr. Emerson's first lectures during the 
consulate of Van Buren. We used to walk in from the 
country to the Masonic Temple (I think it was), through 
the crisp winter night, and listen to that thrilling voice 
of his, so charged with subtle meaning and subtle music, 
as shipwrecked men on a raft to the hail of a shij) that 
came with unhoped-for food and rescue. Cynics might 
say what they liked. Did our own imaginations trans- 
figure dry remainder-biscuit into ambrosia'? At any 
rate, he brought us life, which, on the whole, is no bad 
thing. Was it all transcendentalism'? magic-lantern 
pictures on mist 1 As you will. Those, then, were just 
what we wanted. But it was not so. The delight and 
the benefit were that he put us in communication with 



380 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 

a larger style of thought, sharpened our wits with a 
more pungent phrase, gave us ravishing glimpses of an 
ideal under the dry husk of our New England ; made us 
conscious of the supreme and everlasting originality of 
whatever bit of soul might be in any of us ; freed us, 
in short, from the stocks of prose in which we had sat 
so long that we had grown wellnigh contented in our 
cramps. And who that saw the audience will ever for- 
get it, where every one still capable of fire, or longing 
to renew in them the half-forgotten sense of it,. was 
gathered 1 Those faces, young and old, agleam with 
pale intellectual light, eager with pleased attention, flash 
upon me once more from the deep recesses of the years 
with an exquisite pathos. Ah, beautiful young eyes, 
brimming with love and hope, wholly vanished now in 
that other world we call the Past, or peering doubtfully 
through the pensive gloaming of memory, your light 
impoverishes these cheaper days ! I hear again that 
rustle of sensation, as they turned to exchange glances 
over some pithier thought, some keener flash of that 
humor which always played about the horizon of his 
mind like heat-lightning, and it seems now like the sad 
whisper of the autumn leaves that are whirling around 
me. But would my picture be complete if I forgot that 

ample and vegete countenance of Mr. R of W , 

— how, from its regular post at the corner of the front 
bench, it turned in ruddy triumph to the profaner audi- 
ence as if he were the inexplicably appointed fugleman 
of appreciation 1 I was reminded of him by those hearty 
cherubs in Titian's Assumption that look at you as who 
should say, " Did you ever see a Madonna like that ? 
Did you ever behold one hundred and fifty pounds of 
womanhood mount heavenward before like a rocket 1 " 

To some of us that long-past experience remains as the 
most marvellous and fruitful we have ever had. Emerson 



EMERSON THE LECTURER. 381 

awakened us, saved us from the body of this death. It 
is the sound of the trumpet that the young soul longs 
for, careless what breath may fill it. Sidney heard it in 
the ballad of " Chevy Chase," and we in Emerson. Nor 
did it blow retreat, but called to us with assurance of 
victory. Did they say he was disconnected *? So were 
the stars, that seemed larger to our eyes, still keen with 
that excitement, as w T e walked homeward with prouder 
stride over the creaking snow. And were they not knit 
together by a higher logic than our mere sense could 
master 1 ? Were we enthusiasts'? I hope and believe we 
were, and am thankful to the man who made us worth 
something for once in our lives. If asked what was left % 
what we carried home 1 we should not have been careful 
for an answer. It would have been enough if we had 
said that something beautiful had passed that way. Or 
we might have asked in return what one brought away 
from a symphony of Beethoven 1 Enough that he had- 
set that ferment of wholesome discontent at work in us. 
There is one, at least, of those old hearers, so many of 
w T hom are now in the fruition of that intellectual beauty 
of Avhich Emerson gave them both the desire and the 
foretaste, who will always love to repeat : — 

" Che in la mente m'e fitta, ed or m'accuora 
La earn e buona immagine paterna 
Di voi, quando nel mondo ad ora ad ora 
M'insegnavaste come l'nom s'eterna." 

I am unconsciously thinking, as I write, of the third 
lecture of the present course, in w T hich Mr. Emerson 
gave some delightful reminiscences of the intellectual 
influences in whose movement he had shared. It was 
like hearing Goethe read some passages of the "Wahr- 
heit aus seinem Leben." Not that there was not a little 
Dichtung, too, here and there, as the lecturer built up 
so lofty a pedestal under certain figures as to lift them 



382 EMERSON THE LECTURER. 

into a prominence of obscurity, and seem to masthead 
them there. Everybody was asking his neighbor who 
this or that recondite great man was, in the faint hope 
that somebody might once have heard of him. There 
are those who call Mr. Emerson cold. Let them revise 
their judgment in presence of this loyalty of his that 
can keep warm for half a century, that never forgets a 
friendship, or fails to pay even a fancied obligation to 
the uttermost farthing. This substantiation of shadows 
was but incidental, and pleasantly characteristic of the 
man to those who know and love him. The greater part 
of the lecture was devoted to reminiscences of things 
substantial in themselves. He spoke of Everett, fresh 
from Greece and Germany ; of Channing ; of the trans- 
lations of Margaret Fuller, Ripley, and Dwight ; of the 
Dial and Brook Farm. To what he said of the latter 
an undertone of good-humored irony gave special zest. 
But what every one of his hearers felt was that the pro- 
tagonist in the drama was left out. The lecturer was 
no iEneas to babble the quorum magna pars fui, and, as 
one of his listeners, I cannot help wishing to say how 
each of them was commenting the story as it went along, 
and filling up the necessary gaps in it from his own pri- 
vate store of memories. His younger hearers conld not 
know how much they owed to the benign impersonality, 
the quiet scorn of everything ignoble, the never-sated 
hunger of self-culture, that were personified in the man 
before them. But the older knew how much the coun- 
try's intellectual emancipation was due to the stimulus 
of his teaching and example, how constantly he had kept 
burning the beacon of an ideal life above our lower 
region of turmoil. To him more than to all other causes 
together did the young martyrs of our civil war owe the 
sustaining strength of thoughtful heroism that is so 
touching in every record of their lives. Those who are 



EMERSON THE LECTURER. 383 

grateful to Mr. Emerson, as many of us are, for what 
they feel to be most valuable in their culture, or perhaps 
I should say their impulse, are grateful not so much for 
any direct teachings of his as for that inspiring lift which 
only genius can give, and without which all doctrine is 
chaff. 

This was something like the caret which some of us 
older boys w T ished to fill up on the margin of the masters 
lecture. Few men have been so much to so many, and 
through so large a range of aptitudes and temperaments, 
and this simply because all of us value manhood beyond 
any or all other qualities of character. We may suspect 
in him, here and there, a certain thinness and vagueness 
of quality, but let the w T aters go over him as they list, 
this masculine fibre of his will keep its lively color and its 
toughness of texture. I have heard some great speakers 
and some accomplished orators, but never any that so 
moved and persuaded men as he. There is a kind of 
undertow in that rich baritone of his that sweeps our 
minds from their foothold into deeper waters with a 
drift we cannot and w r ould not resist. And how artfully 
(for Emerson is a long-studied artist in these things) 
does the deliberate utterance, that seems waiting for the 
fit word, appear to admit us partners in the labor of 
thought and make us feel as if the glance of humor w r ere 
a sudden suggestion, as if the perfect phrase lying writ- 
ten there on the desk were as unexpected to him as to 
us ! In that closely-filed speech of his at the Burns 
centenary dinner every word seemed to have just dropped 
down to him from the clouds. He looked far away over 
the heads of his hearers, with a vague kind of expecta- 
tion, as into some private heaven of invention, and the 
w r inged period came at last obedient to his spell. " My 
dainty Ariel ! " he seemed murmuring to himself as he 
cast down his eyes as if in deprecation of the frenzy of 



384 EMERSON THE LECTURES. 

approval and caught another sentence from the Sibylline 
leaves that lay before him ambushed behind a dish of 
fruit and seen only by nearest neighbors. Every sen- 
tence brought down the house, as I never saw one 
brought down before, — and it is not so easy to hit Scots- 
men with a sentiment that has no hint of native brogue 
in it. I watched, for it was an interesting study, how 
the quick sympathy ran flashing from face to face down 
the long tables, like an electric spark thrilling as it went, 
and then exploded in a thunder of plaudits. I watched 
till tables and faces vanished, for I, too, found nryself 
caught up in the common enthusiasm, and my excited 
fancy set me under the bema listening to him who ful- 
mined over Greece. I can never help applying to him 
what Ben Jonson said of Bacon : " There happened in 
my time one noble speaker, who was full of gravity in 
his speaking. His language was nobly censorious. No 
man ever spake more neatly, more pressly, more weight- 
ily, or suffered less emptiness, less idleness, in what he 
uttered. No member of his speech but consisted of 
his own graces. His hearers could not cough, or look 
aside from him, without loss. He commanded where he 
spoke." Those who heard him while their natures were 
yet plastic, and their mental nerves trembled under the 
slightest breath of divine air, will never cease to feel 
and say : — 

" Was never eye did see that face, 

Was never ear did hear that tongue, 
Was never mind did mind his grace, 
That ever thought the travail long; 
But eyes, and ears, and every thought, 
Were with his sweet perfections caught." 



POPE. 



IN 1675 Edward Phillips, the elder of Milton's 
nephews, published his Theatrum Poetarum. In his 
Preface and elsewhere there can be little doubt that he 
reflected the aesthetic principles and literary judgments 
of his now illustrious uncle, who had died in obscurity 
the year before.* The great poet who gave to Euglish 
blank verse the grandeur and compass of organ-music, 
and who in his minor poems kept alive the traditions of 
Fletcher and Shakespeare, died w r ith no foretaste, and 
yet we may believe as confident as ever, of that " im- 
mortality of fame " which he tells his friend Diodati he 
was " meditating with the help of Heaven " in his youth. 
He who may have seen Shakespeare, who doubtless had 
seen Fletcher, and who perhaps personally knew Jon- 
son,! lived to see that false school of writers whom he 
qualified as " good rhymists, but no poets," at once the 
idols and the victims of the taste they had corrupted. 
As he saw, not without scorn, how they found universal 
hearing, while he slowly won his audience fit though few, 
did he ever think of the hero of his own epic at the ear 
of Eve ] It is not impossible ; but however that may 
be, he sowed in his nephew's book the dragon's teeth of 
that long war which, after the lapse of a century and a 

* This was Thomas Warton's opinion. 

t Milton, a London boy, was in his eighth, seventeenth, and twenty- 
ninth years, respectively, when Shakespeare (1616), Fletcher (1625), 
and B. Jonson (1637) died. 

17 Y 



386 pope. 

half, was to end in the expulsion of the usurping dynasty 
and the restoration of the ancient and legitimate race 
whose claim rested on the grace of God. In the follow- 
ing passage surely the voice is Milton's, though the hand 
be that of Phillips : " Wit, ingenuity, and learning in 
verse, even elegancy itself, though that comes nearest, 
are one thing ; true native poetry is another, in which 
there is a certain air and spirit, which, perhaps, the 
most learned and judicious in other arts do not perfectly 
apprehend ; much less is it attainable by any art or 
study." The man who speaks of elegancy as coming 
nearest, certainly shared, if he was not repeating, the 
opinions of him who thirty years before had said that 
" decorum " (meaning a higher or organic unity) was 
" the grand masterpiece to observe " in poetry.* 

It is upon this text of Phillips (as Chalmers has re- 
marked) that Joseph Warton bases his classification of 
poets in the dedication to Young of the first volume of 
his essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, published 
in 1756. That was the earliest public and official dec- 
laration of war against the reigning mode, though pri- 
vate hostilities and reprisals had been going on for some 
time. Addison's panegyric of Milton in the Spectator 
was a criticism, not the less damaging because indirect, 
of the superficial poetry then in vogue. His praise of 
the old ballads condemned by innuendo the artificial 
elaboration of the drawing-room pastoral, by contrasting 
it with the simple sincerity of nature. Himself inca- 
pable of being natural except in prose, he had an in- 
stinct for the genuine virtues of poetry as sure as that 
of Gray. Thomson's " Winter " (1726) was a direct pro- 
test against the literature of Good Society, going as it 
did to prove that the noblest society was that of one's 
own mind heightened by the contemplation of outward 

* In his Tractate on Education. 



pope. 387 

nature. What Thomson's poetical creed was may be 
surely inferred from his having modelled his two prin- 
cipal poems on Milton and Spenser, ignoring rhyme 
altogether in the " Seasons," and in the " Castle of 
Indolence " rejecting the stiff mould of the couplet. 
In 1744 came Akenside's "Pleasures of Imagination," 
whose very title, like a guide-post, points away from the 
level highway of commonplace to mountain-paths and 
less domestic prospects. The poem was stiff and unwil- 
ling, but in its loins lay the seed of nobler births, and 
without it the " Lines written at Tintern Abbey " might 
never have been. Three years later Collins printed his 
little volume of Odes, advocating in theory and ex- 
emplifying in practice the natural supremacy of the 
imagination (though he called it by its older name of 
fancy) as a test to distinguish poetry from verse-making. 
The whole Romantic School, in its germ, no doubt, but 
yet unmistakably foreshadowed, lies already in the 
" Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands." He 
was the first to bring back into poetry something of the 
antique fervor, and found again the long-lost secret of 
being classically elegant without being pedantically cold. 
A skilled lover of music,* he rose from the general 
sing-song of his generation to a harmony that had been 
silent since Milton, and in him, to use his own words, 

" The force of energy is found, 
And the sense rises on the wings of sound.'' 

But beside his own direct services in the reformation 
of our poetry, we owe him a still greater debt as the 
inspirer of Gray, whose " Progress of Poesy," in reach, 
variety, and loftiness of poise, overflies all other Eng- 
lish lyrics like an eagle. In spite of the dulness of con- 
temporary ears, preoccupied with the continuous hum 

* Milton, Collins, and Gray, our three great masters of harmony, 
Vrere all musicians. 



388 pope. 

of the popular hurdy-gurdy, it was the prevailing blast 
of Gray's trumpet that more than anything else called 
men back to the legitimate standard.* Another poet, 
Dyer, whose " Fleece " was published in 1 753, both in 
the choice of his subject and his treatment of it gives 
further proof of the tendency among the younger gen- 
eration to revert to simpler and purer models. Plainly 

* Wordsworth, who recognized forerunners in Thomson, Collins, 
Dyer, and Burns, and who chimes in with the popular superstition 
about Chatterton, is always somewhat niggardly in his appreciation 
of Gray. Yet he owed him not a little. Without Gray's tune in his 
ears, his own noblest Ode would have missed the varied modulation 
which is one of its main charms. Where he forgets Gray, his verse 
sinks to something like the measure of a jig. Perhaps the suggestion 
of one of his own finest lines, 

(" The light that never was on land or sea,") 

was due to Gray's 

" Orient hues unborrowed of the sun." 

I believe it has not been noticed that among the verses in Gray's 
" Sonnet on the Death of West," which Wordsworth condemns as of 
no value, the second — 

" And reddening Phoebus lifts his golden fires" — 

is one of Gray's happy reminiscences from a poet in some respects 
greater than either of them: — 

Jamque rubrum tremulis jubar ignibus erigere alte 
Cum cceptat natura. 

Ltjcret., iv. 404, 405. 

Gray's taste was a sensitive divining-rod of the sources whether of 
pleasing or profound emotion in poetry. Though he prized pomp, he 
did not undervalue simplicity of subject or treatment, if only the 
witch Imagination had cast her spell there. Wordsworth loved soli- 
tude in his appreciations as well as in his daily life, and was the 
readier to find merit in obscurity, because it gave him the pleasure of 
being a first discoverer all by himself. Thus he addresses a sonnet to 
John Dyer. But Gray was one of "the pure and powerful minds" 
who had discovered Dyer during his lifetime, when the discovery of 
poets is more difficult. In 1753 he writes to Walpole: "Mr. Dyer has 
more poetry in his imagination than almost any of our number, but 
rough and injudicious." Dyer has one fine verse, — 

" On the dark level of adversity." 



tope. 389 

enough, Thomson had been his chief model, though 
there are also traces of a careful study of Milton. 

Pope had died in 1744, at the height of his renown, 
the acknowledged monarch of letters, as supreme as Vol- 
taire when the excitement and exposure of his corona- 
tion-ceremonies at Paris hastened his end a generation 
later. His fame, like Voltaire's, was European, and the 
style which he had carried to perfection was paramount 
throughout the cultivated world. The new edition of 
the " Dunciad," with the Fourth Book added, published 
the year before his death, though the substitution of 
Cibber for Theobald made the poem incoherent, had yet 
increased his reputation and confirmed the sway of the 
school whose recognized head he was, by the poignancy 
of its satire, the lucidity of its wit, and the resounding, 
if somewhat uniform march, of its numbers. He had 
been translated into other languages living and dead. 
Voltaire had long before pronounced him " the best poet 
of England, and at present of all the world." * It was 
the apotheosis of clearness, point, and technical skill, of 
the ease that comes of practice, not of the fulness of 
original power. And yet, as we have seen, while he was 
in the very plenitude of his power, there was already a 
widespread discontent, a feeling that what " comes near- 
est," as Phillips calls it, may yet be infinitely far from 
giving those profounder and incalculable satisfactions of 
which the soul is capable in poetry. A movement was 
gathering strength which prompted 

" The age to quit their clogs 
By the known rules of virtuous liberty.'" 

Nor was it wholly confined to England. Symptoms of a 
similar reaction began to show themselves on the Conti- 

* MS. letter of Voltaire, cited by Warburton in his edition of Pope, 
Vol. IV. p. 38, note. The date is 15th October, 1726. 1 do not find 
it in Voltaire's Correspondence. 



390 pope. 

nent, notably in the translation of Milton (1732) and the 
publication of the Nibelungen Lied (1757) by Bodmer, 
and the imitations of Thomson in France. Was it pos- 
sible, then, that there was anything better than good 
sense, elegant diction, and the highest polish of style"? 
Could there be an intellectual appetite which antithesis 
failed to satisfy 1 ? If the horse would only have faith 
enough in his green spectacles, surely the straw would 
acquire, not only the flavor, but the nutritious proper- 
ties of fresh grass. The horse was foolish enough to 
starve, but the public is wiser. It is surprising how pa- 
tiently it will go on, for generation after generation, 
transmuting dry stubble into verdure in this fashion. 

The school which Boileau founded was critical and not 
creative. It was limited, not only in its essence, but by 
the capabilities of the French language and by the natu- 
ral bent of the French mind, which finds a predominant 
satisfaction in phrases if elegantly turned, and can make 
a despotism, political or aesthetic, palatable witb the pep- 
per of epigram. The style of Louis XIV. did w r hat his 
armies failed to do. It overran and subjugated Europe. 
It struck the literature of imagination with palsy, and 
it is droll enough to see Voltaire, after he had got some 
knowledge of Shakespeare, continually endeavoring to re- 
assure himself about the poetry of the grand siecle, and 
all the time asking himself, " Why, in the name of all 
the gods at once, is this not the real thing'?" He seems 
to have felt that there was a dreadful mistake somewhere, 
when poetry must be called upon to prove itself inspired, 
above all when it must demonstrate that it is interesting, 
all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.' Diffi- 
culty, according to Voltaire, is the tenth Muse ; but how 
if there were difficulty in reading as well as writing'? It 
was something, at any rate, which an increasing number 
of persons were perverse enough to feel in attempting 



pope. 391 

the productions of a pseudo-classicism, the classicism of 
red heels aud periwigs. Eveu poor old Dennis himself 
had arrived at a kind of muddled notion that artifice was 
not precisely art, that there were depths in human nature 
which the most perfectly manufactured line of five feet 
could not sound, and passionate elations that could not 
be tuned to the lullaby seesaw of the couplet. The sat- 
isfactions of a conventional taste were very well in their 
own way, but were they, after all, the highest of which 
men were capable who had obscurely divined the Greeks, 
and who had seen Hamlet, Lear, and Othello upon the 
stage ] Was not poetry, then, something which delivered 
us from the dungeon of actual life, instead of basely 
reconciling us with it 1 

A century earlier the school of the cultists had estab- 
lished a dominion, ephemeral, as it soon appeared, but 
absolute while it lasted. Du Bartas, who may, perhaps, 
as fairly as any, lay claim to its paternity,* had been 
called divine, and similar honors had been paid in turn 
to Gongora, Lilly, and Marini, who were in the strictest 
sense contemporaneous. The infection of mere fashion 
will hardly account satisfactorily for a vogue so sudden 
and so widely extended. It may well be suspected that 
there was some latent cause, something at work more 
potent than the fascinating mannerism of any single au- 
thor in the rapid and almost simultaneous diffusion of 
this purely cutaneous eruption. It is not improbable 
that, in the revival of letters, men whose native tongues 
had not yet attained the precision and grace only to 
be acquired by long literary usage, should have learned 
from a study of the Latin poets to value the form above 

* Its taste for verbal affectations is to be found in tbe Roman de la 
Rose, and (yet more absurdly forced) in Gauthier de Coinsy; but in 
Du Bartas the research of effect net seldom subjugates the thought as 
well as the phrase. 



392 pope. 

the substance, and to seek in mere words a conjuring 
property which belongs to them only when they catch 
life and meaning from profound thought or powerful 
emotion. Yet this very devotion to expression at the 
expense of everything else, though its excesses were fatal 
to the innovators who preached and practised it, may 
not have been without good results in refining language 
and fitting it for the higher uses to which it was des- 
tined. The cultists went down before the implacable 
good sense of French criticism, but the defect of this 
criticism was that it ignored imagination altogether, and 
sent Nature about her business as an impertinent bag- 
gage whose household loom competed unlawfully with 
the machine-made fabrics, so exquisitely uniform in pat- 
tern, of the royal manufactories. There is more than a 
fanciful analogy between the style which Pope brought 
into vogue and that which for a time bewitched all ears 
in the latter half of the sixteenth century. As the mas- 
ter had made it an axiom to avoid what was mean or 
low, so the disciples endeavored to escape from what was 
common. This they contrived by the ready expedient 
of the periphrasis. They called everything something 
else. A boot with them was 

" The shining leather that encased the limb " ; 
coffee became 

u The fragrant jnice of Mocha's berry brown"; 

and they were as liberal of epithets as a royal christen- 
ing of proper names. Tw t o in every verse, one to bal- 
ance the other, was the smallest allowance. Here are 
four successive verses from " The Vanity of Human 
Wishes " : — 

" The encumbered oar scarce leaves the (headed coast 
Through purpfc billows and a, floating host. 
The bold Bavarian in a luckless hour 
Tries the dread summits of Caesarian power." 



pope. 393 

This fashion perished also by its own excess, but the 
criticism which laid at the door of the master all the 
faults of his pupils was unjust. It was defective, more- 
over, in overlooking how much of what we call natural 
is an artificial product, above all in forgetting that Pope 
had one of the prime qualities of a great poet in exactly 
answering the intellectual needs of the age in which he 
lived, and in reflecting its lineaments. He did in some 
not inadequate sense hold the mirror up to nature. His 
poetry is not a mountain-tarn, like that of Wordsworth ; 
it is not in sympathy with the higher moods of the 
mind; yet it continues entertaining, in spite of all 
changes of mode. It was a mirror in a drawing-room, 
but it gave back a faithful image of society, powdered 
and rouged, to be sure, and intent on trifles, yet still as 
human in its own way as the heroes of Homer in theirs. 
For the popularity of Pope, as for that of Marini and 
his sect, circumstances had prepared the way. English 
literature for half a century after the Restoration showed 
the marks both of a moral reaction and of an artistic 
vassalage to France. From the compulsory saintship 
and cropped hair of the Puritans men rushed or sneaked, 
as their temperaments dictated, to the opposite cant of 
sensuality and a wilderness of periwig. Charles II. had 
brought back with him from exile French manners, 
French morals, and above all French taste. Misfortune 
makes a shallow mind sceptical. It had made the king 
so ; and this, at a time when court patronage was the 
main sinew of authorship, was fatal to the higher quali- 
ties of literature. That Charles should have preferred 
the stately decorums of the French school, and shoidd 
have mistaken its polished mannerism for style, was 
natural enough. But there was something also in the 
texture of the average British mind which prepared it 
for this subjugation from the other side of the Channel. 
17* 



304 pope. 

No observer of men can have failed to notice the clumsy 
respect which the understanding pays to elegance of 
manner and savoir-faire, nor what an awkward sense of 
inferiority it feels in the presence of an accomplished 
worldliness. The code of society is stronger with most 
persons than that of Sinai, and many a man who would 
not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbor's pocket 
would forego green peas rather than use his knife as a 
shovel. The submission with which the greater number 
surrender their natural likings for the acquired taste of 
what for the moment is called the World is a highly 
curious phenomenon, and, however destructive of origi- 
nality, is the main safeguard of society and nnrse of 
civility. Any one who has witnessed the torments of an 
honest citizen in a foreign gallery before some hideous 
martyrdom which he feels it his duty to admire, though 
it be hateful to him as nightmare, may well doubt 
whether the gridiron of the saint were hotter than that of 
the sinner. It is only a great mind or a strong charac- 
ter that knows how to respect its ow 7 n provincialism and 
can dare to be in fashion with itself. The bewildered 
clown with his " Am I Giles 1 or am I not 1 " was but a 
type of the average man who finds himself uniformed, 
drilled, and keeping step, whether he will or no, with 
the company into which destiny or chance has drafted 
him, and which is marching him inexorably away from 
everything that made him comfortable. 

The insularity of England, wdiile it fostered pride and 
reserve, entailed also that sensitiveness to ridicule which 
haunts pride like an evil genius. " The English," says 
Barclay, writing half a century before the Restoration, 
"have for the most part grave minds and withdrawn, 
as it were, into themselves for counsel ; they won- 
derfully admire themselves and the manners, genius, 
a)>4 spirit of their own nation. In salutation or in 



pope. 395 

writing they endure not (unless haply imbued with for- 
eign manners) to desceud to those words of imaginary 
servitude which the refinement (bland dies) of ages hath 
invented.'' * Yet their fondness of foreign fashions had 
long been the butt of native satirists. Every one re- 
members Portia's merry picture of the English lord : 
il How oddly he is suited ! I think he bought his doub- 
let in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in 
Germany, and his behavior everywhere." But while 
she laughs at his bungling efforts to make himself a cos- 
mopolite in externals, she hints at the persistency of 
his inward Anglicism : " He hath neither Latin, French, 
nor Italian." In matters of taste the Anglo-Saxon mind 
seems always to have felt a painful distrust of itself, 
which it betrays either in an affectation of burly con- 
tempt or in a pretence of admiration equally insincere. 
The young lords who were to make the future court of 
Charles II. no doubt found in Paris an elegance beside 
which the homely bluntness of native manners seemed 
rustic and underbred. They frequented a theatre where 
propriety was absolute upon the stage, though license 
had its full swing behind the scenes. They brought 
home with them to England debauched morals and 
that urbane discipline of maimers which is so agree- 
able a substitute for discipline of mind. The word 
" genteel " came back with them, an outward symptom 
of the inward change. In the last generation, the men 
whose great aim was success in the Other World had 
wrought a political revolution ; now, those whose ideal 
was prosperity in This World were to have their turn 
and to accomplish with their lighter weapons as great a 
change. Before the end of the seventeenth century 
John Bull was pretty well persuaded, in a bewildered 
kind of way, that he had been vulgar, and especially 

* Barclaii Satyricon, p. 382. Barclay had lived in France. 



396 pope, 

that his efforts in literature showed marks of native vig- 
or, indeed, but of a vigor clownish and uncouth. He 
began to be ashamed of the provincialism which had 
given strength, if also something of limitation, to his 
character. 

Waller, who spent a whole summer in polishing the 
life out of ten lines to be written in the Tasso of the 
Duchess of York, expresses the prevailing belief as re- 
garded poetry in the prologue to his " improvement " of 
the " Maid's Tragedy " of Beaumont and Fletcher. He 
made the play reasonable, as it was called, and there is 
a pleasant satire in the fact that it was refused a license 
because there was an immoral king in it. On the throne, 
to be sure, — but on the stage ! Forbid it, decency ! 

" Above our neighbors' our conceptions are, 
But faultless writing is the effect of care; 
Our lines reformed, and not composed in haste, 
Polished like marble, would like marble last. 

Were we but less indulgent to our fau'ts, 
And patience had to cultivate our thoughts, 
Our Muse would flourish, and a nobler rage 
Would honor this than did the Grecian stage." 

It is a curious comment on these verses in favor of care- 
ful writing, that Waller should have failed even to ex- 
press his own meaning either clearly or with propriety. 
He talks of " cultivating our thoughts," when he means 
"pruning our style" ; he confounds the Muse with the 
laurel, or at any rate makes her a plant, and then goes 
on with perfect equanimity to tell us that a nobler 
" rage " (that is, madness) than that of Greece would 
follow the horticultural devices he recommends. It 
never seems to have occurred to Waller that it is the 
substance of what }'OU polish, and not the polish itself, 
that insures duration. Dryden, in his rough-and-ready 
way, has hinted at this in his verses to Congreve on the 



rorE. 397 

" Double Dealer." He begins by stating the received 
theory about the improvement of English literature un- 
der the new regime, but the thin ice of sophistry over 
which Waller had glided smoothly gives way under his 
greater weight, and he finds himself in deep water ere 
he is aware. 

"Well, then, the promised hour has come at last, 
The present age in wit obscures the past; 
Strong were our sires, and as they fought they writ, 
Conquering with force of arm * and dint of wit. 
Theirs was the giant race before the Flood; 
And thus when Charles returned our Empire stood; 
Like Janus he the stubborn soil manured, 
With rules of husbandry the rankness cured, 
Tamed us to manners when the stage was rude, 
And boisterous English wit with art endued; 
Our age was cultivated thus at length, 
But what we gained in skill we lost in strength; 
Our builders were with want of genius curst, 
The second temple was not like the first." 

There would seem to be- a manifest reminiscence of 
Waller's verse in the half-scornful emphasis which Dry- 
den lays on " cultivated." Perhaps he was at first led to 
give greater weight to correctness and to the restraint 
of arbitrary rules from a consciousness that he had a 
tendency to hyperbole and extravagance. But he after- 
wards became convinced that the heightening of dis- 
course by passion was a very different thing from the 
exaggeration which heaps phrase on phrase, and that 
genius, like beauty, can always plead its privilege. Dry- 
den, by his powerful example, by the charm of his verse 
which combines vigor and fluency in a measure perhaps 
never reached by any other of our poets, and above all 
because it is never long before the sunshine of his cheer- 
ful good sense breaks through the clouds of rhetoric, 

* Usually printed arms, but Dryden certainly wrote arm, to corre- 
spond with dint, which he used in its old meaning of a downright 
blow. 



398 POPE. 

and gilds the clipped hedges over which his thought 
clambers like an unpruned vine, — Dryden, one of the 
most truly English of English authors, did more than 
all others combined to bring about the triumphs of 
French standards in taste and French principles in crit- 
icism. But he was always like a deserter who cannot 
feel happy in the victories of the alien arms, and who 
would go back if he could to the camp where he natu- 
rally belonged. Between 1660 and 1700 more French 
words, I believe, were directly transplanted into our 
language than in the century and a half since. What 
was of more consequence, French ideas came with them, 
shaping the form, and through that modifying the spirit, 
of our literature. 

Voltaire, though he came later, was steeped in the 
theories of art which had been inherited as traditions 
of classicism from the preceding generation. He had 
lived in England, and, I have no doubt, gives us a very 
good notion of the tone which was prevalent there in 
his time, an English version of the criticism imported 
from France. He tells us that Mr. Addison was the 
first Englishman who had written a reasonable tragedy. 
And in spite of the growling of poor old Dennis, whose 
sandy pedantry w T as not without an oasis of refreshing 
sound judgment here and there, this was the opinion of 
most persons at that day, except, it may be suspected, 
the judicious and modest Mr. Addison himself. Vol- 
taire says of the English tragedians, — and it will be 
noticed that he is only putting, in another way, the 
opinion of Dryden, — " Their productions, almost all 
barbarous, without polish, order, or probability, have 
astonishing gleams in the midst of their night ; . . . . 
it seems sometimes that nature is not made in England 
as it is elsewhere." Eh bien, the inference is that we 
must try and make it so ! The world must be uniform 



POPE. 399 

in order to be comfortable, and what fashion so becom- 
ing as the one we have invented in Paris 1 It is not a 
little amusing that when Voltaire played master of cer- 
emonies to introduce the bizarre Shakespeare among his 
countrymen, that other kind of nature made a profound- 
er impression on them than quite pleased him. So he 
turned about presently and called his whilome protege a 
buffoon. 

The condition of the English mind at the close of the 
seventeenth century was such as to make it particularly 
sensitive to the magnetism which streamed to it from 
Paris. The loyalty of everybody both in politics and 
religion had been put out of joint. A generation of 
materialists, by the natural rebound which inevitably 
follows over-tension, w r as to balance the ultra-spiritualism 
of the Puritans. As always when a political revolution 
has been wrought by moral agencies, the plunder had 
fallen mainly to the share of the greedy, selfish, and un- 
scrupulous, whose disgusting cant had given a taint of 
hypocrisy to piety itself. Religion, from a burning con- 
viction of the soul, had grown to be with both parties a 
political badge, as little typical of the inward man as 
the scallop of a pilgrim. Sincerity is impossible, unless 
it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps 
the very foundation of character. There seems to have 
been an universal scepticism, and in its worst form, 
that is, with an outward conformity in the interest of 
decorum and order. There was an unbelief that did 
not believe even in itself. 

The difference between the leading minds of the 
former age and that which was supplanting it went to 
the very roots of the soul. Milton was willing to peril 
the success of his crowning work by making the poetry 
of it a stalking-horse for his theological convictions. 
What was that Fame 



400 pope. 

. " Which the clear spirit doth raise 

To scorn delights and live laborious days," 

to the crown of a good preacher who sets 

" The hearts of men on five 
To scoi*n the sordid world and unto heaven aspire"? 

Dean Swift, who aspired to .the mitre, could write a 

book whose moral, if it had any, was that one religion 

was as good as another, since all were political devices, 

and accepted a cure of souls when it was more than 

doubtful whether he believed that his fellow-creatures 

had any souls to be saved, or, if they had, whether they 

were worth saving. The answer which Pulci's Margutte 

makes to Morgante, when asked if he believed in Christ 

or Mahomet, would have expressed well enough the 

creed of the majority of that generation : — 

" To tell thee truly, 
My faith in black 's no greater than in azure, 
But I believe in capons, roast-meat, bouilli, 
And in good wine my faith 's beyond all measure." * 

It was a carnival of intellect without faith, when men 
could be Protestant or Catholic, both at once, or by 
turns, or neither, as suited their interest, when they 
could swear one allegiance and keep on safe terms with 
the other, when prime ministers and commanders-in- 
chief could be intelligencers of the Pretender, nay, 
when even Algernon Sidney himself could be a pen- 
sioner of France. What morality there was, was the 
morality of appearances, of the side that is turned 
toward men and not toward God. The very shameless- 
ness of Congreve is refreshing in that age of sham. 

It was impossible that anything truly great, that is, 
great on the moral and emotional as well as the intellec- 
tual side, should be produced by such a generation. 
But something intellectually great could be and was. 

* Morgante, xviii. 115. 



pope. 401 

The French mind, always stronger in perceptive and 
analytic than in imaginative qualities, loving precision, 
grace, and finesse, prone to attribute an almost magical 
power to the scientific regulation whether of politics or 
religion, had brought wit and fancy and the elegant arts 
of society to as great perfection as was possible by the 
a priori method. Its ideal in literature was to conjure 
passion within the magic circle of courtliness, or to 
combine the appearance of careless ease and gayety of 
thought with intellectual exactness of statement. The 
eternal watchfulness of a wit that never slept had made 
it distrustful of the natural emotions and the uncon- 
ventional expression of them, and its first question about 
a sentiment was, Will it be safe ? about a phrase, Will 
it pass with the Academy 1 The effect of its example 
on English literature would appear chiefly in neatness 
and facility of turn, in point and epigrammatic compact- 
ness of phrase, and these in conveying conventional 
sentiments and emotions, in appealing to good society 
rather than to human nature. Its influence would be 
greatest where its success had been most marked, in 
what was called moral poetry, whose chosen province 
was manners, and in which satire, with its avenging 
scourge, took the place of that profounder art whose 
office it was to purify, not the manners, but the source 
of them in the soul, by pity and terror. The mistake 
of the whole school of French criticism, it seems to me, 
lay in its tendency to confound what was common with 
what was vulgar, in a* too exclusive deference to authority 
at the expense of all free movement of the mind. 

There are certain defects of taste which correct them- 
selves by their own extravagance. Language, I suspect, 
is more apt to be reformed by the charm of some master 
of it, like Milton, than by any amount of precept. The 
influence of second-rate writers for evil is at best ephem- 



402 Pope. 

eral, for true style, the joint result of culture and natu- 
ral aptitude, is always in fashion, as line manners always 
are, in whatever clothes. Perhaps some reform was 
needed when Quarles, who had no mean gift of poesy, 
could write, 

" My passion has no April in her eyes: 
I cannot spend in mists; I cannot mizzle; 
My fluent brains are too severe to drizzle 
Slight drops. 1 ' * 

Good taste is an excellent thing when it confines itself 
to its own rightful province of the proprieties, but when 
it attempts to correct those profound instincts out of 
whose judgments the higher principles of aesthetics have 
been formulated, its success is a disaster. During the 
era when the French theory of poetry was supreme, we 
notice a decline froni imagination to fancy, from pas- 
sion to wit, from metaphor, which fuses image and 
thought in one, to simile, which sets one beside the 
other, from the supreme code of the natural sympathies 
to the parochial by-laws of etiquette. The imagination 
instinctively Platonizes, and it is the essence of poetry 
that it should be unconventional, that the soul of it 
should subordinate the outward parts ; while the arti- 
ficial method proceeds from a principle the reverse of 
this, making the spirit lackey the form. 

Waller preaches up this new doctrine in the epilogue 
to the " Maid's Tragedy " : — 

** Nor is 't less strange such mighty wits as those 
Should use a style in tragedy like prose; 
Well-sounding verse, where princes tread the stage, 
Should speak their virtue and describe their rage." 

* Elegie on Doctor Wilson. But if Quarles had been led astray by 
the vices of Donne's manner, he had good company in Herbert and 
Vaughan. In common with them, too, he had that luck of simpleness 
which is even more delightful than wit. In the same poem lie says, — 
" Go, glorious soul, and lay thy temples down 
In Abram's bosom, in the sacred dutim 
Of sofletern'ly" 



pope. 403 

That it should be beneath the dignity of princes to 
speak in anything but rhyme can only be paralleled by 
Mr. Puff's law that a heroine can go decorously mad 
only in white satin. Waller, I suppose, though with so 
loose a thinker one cannot be positive, uses "describe" 
in its Latin sense of limitation. Fancy Othello or Lear 
confined to this go-cart ! Phillips touches the true 
point when he says, " And the truth is, the use of 
measure alone, without any rime at all, would give more 
scope and liberty both to style and fancy than can pos- 
sibly be observed in rime." # But let us test Waller's 
method by an example or two. His monarch made 
reasonable, thus discourses : — 

" Courage our greatest failings does supply, 
And makes all good, or handsomely we die. 
Life is a thing of common use ; by heaven 
As well to insects as to monarchs given; 
But for the crown, 't is a more sacred thing; 
I '11 dying lose it, or I '11 live a king. 
Come, Diphilus, we must together walk 
And of a matter of importance talk." [Exeunt. 

Blank verse, where the sentiment is trivial as here, 
merely removes prose to a proper ideal distance, where 
it is in keeping with more impassioned parts, but com- 
monplace set to this rocking-horse jog irritates the 
nerves. There is nothing here to remind us of the older 
tragic style but the exeunt at the close. Its pithy 
conciseness and the relief which it brings us from his 
majesty's prosing give it an almost poetical savor. As- 
patia's reflections upon suicide (or " suppressing our 
breath," as she calls it), in the same play, will make few 
readers regret that Shakespeare was left to his own un- 
assisted barbarism when he wrote Hamlet's soliloquy on 
tne same topic : — 

" 'T was in compassion of our woe 
That nature first made poisons grow, 

* Preface to the Theatrum. 



4.0-1 pope. 

For hopeless wretches such as I 
Kindly providing means to die: 
As mothers do their children keep, 
So Nature feeds and makes us sleep. 
The indisposed she does invite 
To go to bed before 't is night." 

Correctness in this case is but a synonyme of monotony, 

and words are chosen for the number of their syllables, 

for their rubbishy value to fill-in, instead of being forced 

upon the poet by the meaning which occupies the mind. 

Language becomes useful for its diluting properties, 

rather than as the medium by means of which the 

thought or fancy precipitate themselves in crystals upon 

a connecting thread of purpose. Let us read a few 

verses from Beaumont and Fletcher, that we may feel 

fully the difference between the rude and the reformed 

styles. This also shall be a speech of Aspatia's. An- 

tiphila, one of her maidens, is working the story of 

Theseus and Ariadne in tapestry, for the older masters 

loved a picturesque background and knew the value of 

fanciful accessaries. Aspatia thinks the face of Ariadne 

not sad enough : — 

" Do it by me, 
Do it again by me, the lost Aspatia, 
And you shall find all true but the wild island. 
Suppose I stand upon tiie seabeach now, 
Mine arms thus, and my hair blown with the wind, 
Wild as that desert; and let all about me 
Be teachers of my story. Do my face 
(Tf ever thou hadst feeling of a sorrow) 
Thus, thus, Antiphila; strive to mnke me look 
Like sorrow's monument; and the trees aboukme 
Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks 
Groan with continual surges; and behind me 
Make all a desolation." 

What instinctive felicity of versification ! what sobbing 
breaks and passionate repetitions are here ! 

We see what the direction of the new tendency was, 
but it would be an inadequate or a dishonest criticism 



pope. 405 

that should hold Pope responsible for the narrow com- 
pass of the instrument which was his legacy from his 
immediate predecessors, any more than for the weari- 
some thrumming-over of his tune by those who came 
after him and who had caught his technical skill without 
his genius. The question properly stated is, How much 
was it possible to make of the material supplied by the 
age in which he lived 1 and how much did he make of 
it 1 Thus far, among the great English poets who pre- 
ceded him, we have seen actual life represented by 
Chaucer, imaginative life by Spenser, ideal life by Shake- 
speare, the interior life by Milton. But as everything 
aspires to a rhythmical utterance of itself, so conven- 
tional life, itself a new phenomenon, was waiting for its 
poet. It found or made a most fitting one in Pope. He 
stands for exactness of intellectual expression; for per- 
fect propriety of phrase (I speak of him at his best), and 
is a striking instance how much success and permanence 
of reputation depend on conscientious finish as well as 
on native endowment. Butler asks, — 

" Then why should those who pick and choose 
The best of all the best compose, 
And join it by Mosaic art, 
In graceful order, part to part, 
To make the whole in beauty suit, 
Not merit as complete repute 
As those Avho, with less art and pain, 
Can do it with their native brain? " 

Butler knew very well that precisely what stamps a man 
as an artist is this power of finding out what is " the 
best of all the best." 

I confess that I come to the treatment of Pope with 
diffidence. I was brought up in the old superstition 
that he was the greatest poet that ever lived ; and when 
I came to find that I had instincts of my own, and my 
mind was brought in contact with the apostles of a more 



406 pope. 

esoteric doctrine of poetry, I felt that ardent desire for 
smashing the idols I had been brought up to worship, 
without any regard to their artistic beauty, which char- 
acterizes youthful zeal. What was it to me that Pope 
was called a master of style 1 I felt, as Addison says 
in his Freeholder when answering an argument in favor 
of the Pretender because he could speak English and 
George I. could not, " that I did not wish to be tyran- 
nized over in the best English that ever was spoken." 
The young demand thoughts that find an echo in their 
real and not their acquired nature, and care very little 
about the dress they are put in. It is later that we 
learn to like the conventional, as we do olives. There 
was a time when I could not read Pope, but disliked him 
on principle as old Roger Ascham seems to have felt 
about Italy when he says, " I was once in Italy myself, 
but I thank God my abode there was only nine days." 

But Pope fills a very important place in the history of 
English poetry, and must be studied by every one who 
would come to a clear knowledge of it. I have since 
read over every line that Pope ever wrote, and every 
letter written by or to him, and that more than once. 
If I have not come to the conclusion that he is the 
greatest of poets, I believe that I am at least in a con- 
dition to allow him every merit that is fairly his. I 
have said that Pope as a literary man represents pre- 
cision and grace of expression ; but as a poet he repre- 
sents something more, — nothing less, namely, than one 
of those eternal controversies of taste which will last 
as long as the imagination and understanding divide 
men between them. It is not a matter to be settled 
by any amount of argument or demonstration. There 
are born Popists or Wordsworthians, Lockists or Kant- 
ists, and there is nothing more to be said of the matter. 

Wordsworth was not in a condition to do Pope justice. 



tope. 40> 

A man brought up in sublime mountain solitudes, and 
whose nature was a solitude more vast than they, walk- 
ing an earth which quivered with the throe of the 
French Revolution, the child of an era of profound 
mental and moral movement, it could not be expected 
that he should be in sympathy with the poet of artificial 
life. Moreover, he was the apostle of imagination, and 
came at a time when the school which Pope founded 
had degenerated into a mob of mannerists who wrote 
with ease, and who with their congenial critics united at 
ouce to decry poetry which brought in the dangerous 
innovation of having a soul in it. 

But however it may be with poets, it is very certain 
that a reader is happiest whose mind is broad enough 
to enjoy the natural school for its nature, and the artifi- 
cial for its artificiality, provided they be only good of 
their kind. At any rate, we must allow that the man 
who can produce one perfect work is either a great gen- 
ius or a very lucky one ; and so far as we who read are 
concerned, it is of secondary importance which. And 
Pope has done this in the " Rape of the Lock." For 
wit, fancy, invention, and keeping, it has never been 
surpassed. I do not say there is in it poetry of the high- ~x 
est order, or that Pope is a poet whom any one would 
choose as the companion of his best hours. There is no 
inspiration in it, no trumpet-call, but for pure entertain- 
ment it is unmatched. There are two kinds of genius. 
The first and highest may be said to speak out of the 
eternal to the present, and must compel its age to un- 
derstand it ; the second understands its age, and tells it 
what it washes to be told. Let us find strength and in- 
spiration in the -one, amusement and instruction in the 
other, and be honestly thankful for both. 

The very earliest of Pope's productions give indications 
of that sense and discretion, as well as wit, which after- 



408 pope. 

ward so eminently distinguished him. The facility of 
expression is remarkable, and we find also that perfect 
balance of metre, which he afterward carried so far as to 
be wearisome. His pastorals were written in his six- 
teenth year, and their publication immediately brought 
him into notice. The following four verses from his 
first pastoral are quite characteristic in their antithetic 
balance : — 

" You that, too wise for pride, too good for power, 
Enjoy the glory to be great no more, 
And carrying with you all the world can boast, 
To all tiie world illustriously are lost! " 

The sentiment is affected, and reminds one of that future 
period of Pope's Correspondence with his Friends, when 
Swift, his heart corroding with disappointed ambition at 
Dublin, Bolingbroke raising delusive turnips at his farm, 
and Pope pretending not to feel the lampoons which 
imbittered his life, played together the solemn farce of 
affecting indifference to the world by which it would 
have agonized them to be forgotten, and wrote letters 
addressed to each other, but really intended for that 
posterity whose opinion they assumed to despise. 

In these pastorals there is an entire want of nature. 
For example in that on the death of Mrs. Tempest : — 

" Her f;'p is whispered by the gentle breeze 
A id told in sighs to all the trembling trees; 
The trembling trees, in every plain and wood, 
Her fate remurmur to the silver flood; 
The silver flood, so lately calm, appears 
Swelled with new passion, and o'erflows with tears; 
The winds and trees and floods her death deplore 
Daphne, our grief! our glory now no more! " 

All this is as perfectly professional as the mourning 
of an undertaker. Still worse, Pope materializes and 
makes too palpably objective that sympathy which our 
grief forces upon outward nature. Milton, before mak- 
ing the echoes mourn for Lycidas, puts our feelings in 



pope. 409 

tune, as it were, and hints at his own imagination as the 

source of this emotion in inanimate things, — 

" But, the heavy change now thou art gone ! " 

In " Windsor Forest " we find the same thing again : — ■ 

" Here his first lays majestic Denham sung, 
There the last numbers flowed from Cowley's tongua; 
O early lost, what tears the river shed 
When the sad pomp along his banks was led! 
His drooping swans on every note expire, 
And on his willows hung each muse's lyre! " 

In the same poem he indulges the absurd conceit 

that, 

" Beasts urged by us, their fellow-beasts pursue, 
And leara of man each other to undo"; 

and in the succeeding verses gives some striking in- 
stances of that artificial diction, so inappropriate to 
poems descriptive of natural objects and ordinary life, 
which brought verse-making to such a depth of absurd- 
ity in the course of the century. 

" With slaughtering guns, the unwearied fowler roves 
Where frosts have whitened all the naked groves; 
Where doves in flocks the leafless trees o'ershade, 
And lonely wookcocks haunt the watery glade; 
He lifts the tube and levels with his eye, 
Straight a short thunder breaks the frozen sky: 
Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath, 
The clamorous lapwings feel the leaden death; 
Oft as the mounting larks their notes prepare, 
They fall and leave their little lives in air." 

Now one would imagine that the tube of the fowler was 
a telescope instead of a gun. And think of the larks 
preparing their notes like a country choir ! Yet even 
here there are admirable lines, — 

" Oft as in airy rings they skim the heath," 
" They fall and leave their little lives in air," 

for example. 

In Pope's next poem, the " Essay on Criticism," the 

18 



410 pope. 

wit and poet become apparent. It is full of clear 
thoughts, compactly expressed. In this poem, written 
when Pope was only twenty-one, occur some of those 
lines which have become proverbial ; such as 

" A little learning is a dangerous thing "; 

" For fools rush in where angels fear to tread " ; 

M True wit is Nature to advantage dressed, 
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed 

" For each ill author is as bad a friend." 

In all of these we notice that terseness in which (re- 
gard being had to his especial range of thought) Pope 
has never been equalled. One cannot help being struck 
also with the singular discretion which the jDoem gives 
evidence of. I do not know where to 1 
thor in w^hom it appeared so early, ai 
vivacity of his mind and the constan 
tation of hi3 wit, it is still more ^ 
boyish correspondence with poor olu. wjuiw^j, 
would suppose him to be the man and Wycherley the 
youth. Pope's understanding was no less vigorous 
(when not the dupe of his nerves) than his fancy was 
lightsome and sprightly. 

I come now to what in itself would be enough to have 
immortalized him as a poet, the " Rape of the Lock," 
in which, indeed, he appears more purely as poet than 
in any other of his productions. Elsewhere he has 
shown more force, more wit, more reach of thought, but 
nowhere such a truly artistic combination of elegance 
and fancy. His genius has here found its true direction, 
and the very same artificiality, which in his pastorals 
was unpleasing, heightens the effect, and adds to the 
general keeping. As truly as Shakespeare is the poet 
of man, as God made him, dealing with great passions 
and innate motives, so truly is Pope the poet of society, 



POPE. 411 

the delineator of manners, the exposer of those motives 
which may be called acquired, whose spring is in insti- 
tutions and habits of purely worldly origin. 

The "Rape of the Lock" was written in Pope's twenty- 
fourth year, and the machinery of the Sylphs was 
added at the suggestion of Dr. Garth, — a circumstance 
for which we can feel a more unmixed gratitude to him 
than for writing the "Dispensary." The idea was taken 
from that entertaining book " The Count de Gabalis," in 
which Fouque afterward found the hint for his "Un- 
dine " ; but the little sprites as they appear in the poem 
are purely the creation of Pope's fancy. 

The theory of the poem is excellent. The heroic is 
out of the question in fine society. It is perfectly true 
that almost every door we pass in the street closes upon 
its private tragedy, but the moment a great passion 
enters a man he passes at once out of the artificial into 
the human. So long as he continues artificial, the sub- 
lime is a conscious absurdity to him. The mock-heroic 
then is the only way in which the petty actions and 
sufferings of the fine world can be epically treated, and 
the contrast continually suggested with subjects of larger 
scope and more dignified treatment, makes no small 
part of the pleasure and sharpens the point of the wit. 
The invocation is admirable : — 

" Say, what strange motive, Goddess, could compel, 
A well-bred lord to assault a gentle belle? 
O say what stranger cause, yet unexplored, 
Could make a gentle belle reject a lord? " 

The keynote of the poem is here struck, and we are able 
to put ourselves in tune with it. It is not a parody of 
the heroic style, but only a setting it in satirical juxta- 
position w-ith cares and events and modes of thought 
with which it is in comical antipathy, and while it is 
not degraded, they are shown in their triviality. The 



412 rorE. 

"clouded cane," as compared with the Homeric spear, 
indicates the difference of scale, the lower plane of 
emotions and passions. The opening of the action, too, 
is equally good : — ■ 

" Sol through white curtains shot a timorous ray, 
And oped those eyes that must eclipse the day, 
Now lapdogs give themselves the rousing shake, 
And sleepless lovers just at twelve awake; 
Thrice rung the bell, the slipper knocked the ground, 
And the pi-essed watch returned a silver sound." 

The mythology of the Sylphs is. fall of the most fanciful 
wit; indeed, wit infused with fancy is Pope's peculiar 
merit. The Sylph is addressing Belinda : — ■ 

" Know, then, unnumbered spirits round thee fly, 
The light militia of the lower sky; 
These, though unseen, are ever on the wing, 
Hang o'er the box and hover round the ring. 
As now your own our beings were of old, 
And once enclosed in woman's beauteous mould ; 
Think not, when woman's transient breath is fled, 
That all her vanities at once ai*e dead; 
Succeeding vanities she still regards, 
And, though she plays no more, o'erlooks the cards. 
For when the fair in all their pride expire, 
To their first elements their souls retire; 
The sprites of fiery termagants in flame 
Mount up and take a salamander's name; 
Soft yielding nymphs to water glide away 
And sip, with nymphs, their elemental tea; 
The graver prude sinks downward to a gnome, 
In search of mischief still on earth to roam; 
The light coquettes in sylphs aloft repair 
And sport and flutter in the fields of air." 

And the contrivance by which Belinda is awakened is 
also perfectly in keeping with all the rest of the machin- 
ery:— 

" He said : when Shock, who thought she slept too long, 
Leaped up and waked his mistress with his tongue; 
'T was then, Belinda, if report say true, 
Thy eyes first opened on a billet-doux." 



pope. 413 

Throughout this poem the satiric wit of Pope peeps out 
in the pleasantest little smiling ways, as where, in de- 
scribing the toilet-table, he says : — 

u Hei*e files of pins extend their shining rows, 
Puffs, powders, patches, Bibles, billet-doux.'''' 

Or when, after the fatal lock has been severed, 

" Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes, 
And screams of horror rend the affrighted skies, 
Not louder shrieks to pitying Heaven are cast 
When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last ; 
Or when rich china-vessels, fallen from high, 
In glittering dust and painted fragments lie ! " 

And so, when the conflict begins : — 

** Now Jove suspends his golden scales in air; 
Weighs the men's wits against the ladies' hair; 
The doubtful beam long nods from side to side; 
At length the wits mount up, the hairs subside." 

But more than the wit and fancy, I think, the perfect 
keeping of the poem deserves admiration. Except a 
touch of grossness, here and there, there is the most 
pleasing harmony in all the conceptions and images. 
The punishments which he assigns to the sylphs who 
neglect their duty are charmingly appropriate and in- 
genious : — 

" Whatever spirit, careless of his charge, 
His post neglects, or leaves the fair at large, 
Shall feel sharp vengeance soon o'ertake his sins; 
Be stopped in vials or transfixed with pins, 
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie, 
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye; 
Gums and pomatums shall his flight restrain, 
While clogged he beats his silver wings in vain ; 
Or alum styptics with contracting power, 
Shrink his thin essence like a rivelled flower; 
Or as Ixion fixed the wretch shall feel 
The giddy motion of the whirling wheel, 
In fumes of burning chocolate shall glow. 
And tremble at the sea that froths below ! " 



414 pope. 

The speech of Thalestris, too, with its droll climax, 
is equally good : — 

" Mcthinks already I your tears survey, 
Already hear the horrid things they say, 
Already see you a degraded toast, 
And all your honor in a whisper lost! 
How shall I then your helpless fame defend? 
'T will then be infamy to seem your friend! 
And shall this prize, the inestimable prize, 
Exposed through crystal to the gazing eyes, 
And heightened by the diamond's circling rays, 
On that rapacious hand forever blaze? 
Sooner shall grass in Hydepark Circus grow, 
And wits take lodging in the sound of Bow, 
Sooner let earth, air, sea, in chaos fall, 
Men, monkeys, lapdogs, parrots, perish all! " 

So also Belinda's account of the morning omens : — 

" 'T was this the morning omens seemed to tell; 
Thrice from my trembling hand the patch-box fell ; 
The tottering china shook without a wind; 
Nay, Poll sat mute, and Shock was most unkind." 

The idea of the goddess of Spleen, and of her palace, 
where 

" The dreaded East is all the wind that blows,'* 

was a very happy one. In short, the whole poem more 
truly deserves the name of a creation than anything 
Pope ever wrote. The action is confined to a world of 
his own, the supernatural agency is wholly of his own 
contrivance, and nothing is allowed to overstep the 
limitations of the subject. It ranks by itself as one of 
the purest works of human fancy ; whether that fancy 
be strictly poetical or not is another matter. If we 
compare it with the "Midsummer-night's Dream," an 
uncomfortable doubt is suggested. The perfection of 
form in the " Rape of the Lock " is to me conclusive 
evidence that in it the natural genius of Pope found 
fuller and freer expression than in any other of his 
poems. The others are aggregates of brilliant passages 
rather than harmonious wholes. 



pope. 415 

It is a droll illustration of the inconsistencies of 
human nature, a more profound satire than Pope him- 
self ever wrote, that his fame should chiefly rest upon 
the " Essay on Man." It has been praised and admired 
by men of the most opposite beliefs, and men of no 
belief at all. Bishops and free-thinkers have met here 
on a common ground of sympathetic approval. And, 
indeed, there is no particular faith in it. It is a droll 
medley of inconsistent opinions. It proves only two 
things beyond a question, — that Pope was not a great 
tninker ; and that wherever he found a thought, no 
matter what, he could express it so tersely, so clearly, 
and with such smoothness of versification as to give it 
an everlasting currency. Hobbes's unwieldy Leviathan, 
left stranded there on the shore of the last age, and 
nauseous with the* stench of its selfishness, — from this 
Pope distilled a fragrant oil with which to fill the 
brilliant lamps of his philosophy, — lamps like those in 
the tombs of alchemists, that go out the moment the 
healthy air is let in upon them. The only positive 
doctrines in the poem are the selfishness of Hobbes set 
to music, and the Pantheism of Spinoza brought down 
from mysticism to commonplace. Nothing can be more 
absurd than many of the dogmas taught in this " Essay 
on Man." For example, Pope aflfrms explicitly that 
instinct is something better than reason : — 

" See him from Nature rising slow to art, 
To copy instinct then was reason's part; 
Thus, then, to man the voice of nature spake; — 
Go, from the creatures thy instructions take; 
Learn from the beasts what food the thickets yield; 
Learn from the birds the physic of the field; 
The arts of building from the bee receive; 
Learn of the mole to plough, the worm to weave; 
Learn of the little nautilus to sail, 
Spread the thin oar, or catch the driving gale." 

I say nothing of the quiet way in which the general 



416 pope. 

term " nature " is substituted for God, but how unut- 
terably void of reasonableness is the theory that Nature 
would have left her highest product, man, destitute of 
that instinct with which she had endowed her other 
creatures ! As if reason were not the most sublimated 
form of instinct. The accuracy on which Pope prided 
himself, and for which he is commended, was not ac- 
curacy of thought so much as of expression. And he 
cannot always even claim this merit, but only that of 
correct rhyme, as in one of the passages I have already 
quoted from the "Rape of the Lock" he talks of cast- 
ing shrieks to heaven, — a performance of some diffi- 
culty, except when cast is needed to rhyme with last. 

But the supposition is that in the " Essay on Man " 
Pope did not himself know what he was writing. He 
was only the condenser and epigrammatizer of Boiing- 
broke, — a very fitting St. John for such a gospel. Or, 
if he did know, we can account for the contradictions by 
supposing that he threw 7 in some of the commonplace 
moralities to conceal his real drift. Johnson asserts 
that Bohngbroke in private laughed at Pope's having 
been made the mouthpiece of opinions which he did not 
hold. But this is hardly probable when w 7 e consider the 
relations between them. It is giving Pope altogether 
too little credit for intelligence to suppose that he did 
not understand the principles of his intimate friend. 
The caution with which he at first concealed the author- 
ship would argue that he had doubts as to the reception 
of the poem. When it was attacked on the score of in- 
fidelity, he gladly accepted Warburton's championship, 
and assumed w r hatever pious interpretation he contrived 
to thrust upon it. The beginning of the poem is famil- 
iar to everybody : — 

" Awake, my St. John, leave all meaner things 
To low ambition and the pride of kings \ 



POPE. 41? 

Let us (since life can little more supply 
Than just to look about us and to die) 
Expatiate free o er all this scene of man, 
A mighty maze, — but not without a plan "; 

To expatiate o'er a mighty maze is rather loose writing , 

but the last verse, as it stood in the original edition^ 

was, 

<: A mighty maze of walks without a plan " ; 

and perhaps this came nearer Pope's real opinion than 
the verse he substituted for it. Warburton is carefin 
not to mention this variation in his notes. The poem ia 
everywhere as remarkable for its confusion of logic as it 
often is for ease of verse and grace of expression. Au 
instance of both occurs in a passage frequently quoted : ^ 

" Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate; 
All but the page prescribed, their present state ; 
From brutes what men, from men what spirits know, 
Or who would suffer being here below? 
The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day, 
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play? 
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food, 
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood. 
O, blindness to the future kindly given 
That each may fill the circle meant by heaven! 
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall, 
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled, 
And now a bubble burst, and now a world ! " 

Now, if "heaven from all creatures hides the book of 
fate," why should not the lamb " skip and play," if he 
had the reason of man 1 Why, because he would then 
be able to read the book of fate. But if man himself 
cannot, why, then, could the lamb with the reason of 
man 1 ? For, if the lamb had the reason of man, the 
book of fate would still be hidden, so far as himself was 
concerned. If the inferences we can draw from appear- 
ances are equivalent to a knowledge of destiny, the 
knowing enough to take an umbrella in cloudy weather 
18* aa 



418 pope. 

might be called so. There is a manifest confusion be- 
tween what we know about ourselves and about other 
people j the whole point of the passage being that we 
are always mercifully blinded to our own future, how- 
ever much reason we may possess. There is also inac- 
curacy as well as inelegance in saying, 

" Heaven, 
Who sees with equal eye/as God of all, 
A hero perish or a sparrow fall." 

To the last verse Warburton, desirous of reconciling his 
author with Scripture, appends a note referring to Mat- 
thew x. 29 : "Are not two sparrows sold for one farthing] 
and one of them shall not fall to the ground without 
your Father." It would not have been safe to have 
referred to the thirty-first verse: "Fear ye not, there- 
fore, ye are of more value than many sparrows." 

To my feeling, one of the most beautiful passages 
in the whole poem is that familiar one : — 

" Lo, the poor Indian whose untutored mind 
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind, 
His soul proud science never taught to stray- 
Far as the solar walk or milk}' way: 
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given 
Behind the cloud-topt hill a humbler heaven ; 
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced, 
Some happier island in the watery waste, 
Where slaves once more their native land behold, 
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold. 
To be contents his natural desire, 
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire, 
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky, 
His faithful dog shall bear him company." 

But this comes in as a corollary to what went just 
before : — 

" Hope springs eternal in the human breast, 
Man never is but always to be blest; 
The soul, uneasy, and confined from home, 
Rests and expatiates in a life to come." 



pope. 419 

Then follows immediately the passage about the poor 
Indian, who, after all, it seems, is contented with merely 
being, and whose soul, therefore, is an exception to the 
general rule. And what have the "solar walk" (as he 
calls it) and "milky way" to do with the affair? Does 
our hope of heaven depend on our knowledge of astron- 
omy? Or does he mean that science and faith are neces- 
sarily hostile 1 And, after being told that it is the " un- 
tutored mind" of the savage which "sees God in clouds 
and hears him in the wind," we are rather surprised 
to find that the lesson the poet intends to teach is that 

" All are but parts of one stupendous whole, 
Whose body Mature is, and God the soul. 
That, changed through all, and yet in all the same, 
Great in the earth, as in the ethereal frame, 
Warms in the sun, refreshes in the breeze, 
Glows in the stars, and blossoms in the trees." 

So that we are no better off than the untutored Indian, 
after the poet has tutored us. Dr. Warburton makes a 
rather lame attempt to ward off the charge of Spinozism 
from this last passage. He would have found it harder 
to show that the acknowledgment of any divine revela- 
tion would not overturn the greater part of its teach- 
ings. If Pope intended by his poem all that the bishop 
takes for granted in his commentary, we must deny him 
what is usually claimed as 'his first merit, — clearness. 
If he did not, we grant him clearness as a writer at the 
expense of sincerity as a man. Perhaps a more charita- 
ble solution of the difficulty would be, that Pope's pre- 
cision of thought was no match for the fluency of his 
verse. 

Lord Byron goes so far as to say, in speaking of Pope, 
that he who executes the best, no matter what his 
department, will rank the highest. I think there are 
enough indications in these letters of Byron's, however, 
that they were written rather more against Wordsworth 



420 pope. 

than for Pope. The rule he lays down would make Vol- 
taire a greater poet, in some respects, than Shakespeare. 
Byron cites Petrarch as an example ; yet if Petrarch had 
put nothing more into his sonnets than execution, there 
are plenty of Italian sonneteers who would be his match. 
But, in point of fact, the department chooses the man and 
not the man the department, and it has a great deal to 
do with our estimate of him. Is the department of Mil- 
ton no higher than that of Butler ] Byron took especial 
care not to write in the style he commended. But I 
think Pope has received quite as much credit in respect 
even of execution as he deserves. Surely execution is 
not confined to versification alone. What can be worse 
than this 1 

** At length Erasmus, that great, injured name, 
(The glory of the priesthood and the shame,) 
Stemmed the wild torrent of a "barbarous age, 
And drove those holy vandals off the stage." 

It would have been hard for Pope to have found a pret- 
tier piece of confusion in any of the small authors he 
laughed at than this image of a great, injured name 
stemming a torrent and driving vandals off the stage. 
And in the following verses the image is helplessly con- 
fused : — 

"Kind self-conceit to some her glass applies, 
Which no one looks in with another's eyes, 
But, as the flatterer or dependant paint, 
Beholds himself a patriot, chief, or saint." 

The use of the word " applies " is perfectly un-English ; 
and it seems that people who look in this remarkable 
glass see their pictures and not their reflections. Often, 
also, when Pope attempts the sublime, his epithets be- 
come curiously unpoetical, as where he says, in the 
Dunciad, 

" As, one by one, at dread Medea's strain, 
The sickening stars fade off the ethereal plain." 1 



pope. 421 

And not seldom he is satisfied with the music of the 
verse without much regard to fitness of imagery ; in the 
" Essay on Man," for example : — 

" Passions, like elements, though born to fight, 
Yet, mixed and softened, in his work unite; 
These 't is enough to temper and employ; 
But what composes man can man destroy? 
Suffice that Reason keep to Nature's road, 
Subject, compound them, follow her and God. 
Love, Hope, and Joy, fair Pleasure's smiling train, 
Hate, Fear, and Grief, the family of Pain, 
These, mixed with Art, and to due bounds confined, 
Make and maintain the balance of the mind." 

Here reason is represented as an apothecary compound- 
ing pills of " pleasure's smiling train " and the " family 
of pain." And in the Moral Essays, 

" Know God and Nature only are the same; 
In man the judgment shoots at flying game, 
A bird of passage, gone as soon as found, 
Now in the moon, perhaps, now under ground." 

The " judgment shooting at flying game " is an odd 
image enough ; but I think a bird of passage, now in 
the moon and now under ground, could be found no- 
where — out of Goldsmith's Natural History, perhaps. 
An epigrammatic expression will also tempt him into 
saying something without basis in truth, as where he 
ranks together " Macedonia's madman and the Swede," 
and says that neither of them " looked forward farther 
than his nose," a slang phrase which may apply well 
enough to Charles XII., but certainly not to the pupil 
of Aristotle, who showed himself capable of a large 
political forethought. So, too, the rhyme, if correct, is 
a sufficient apology for want of propriety in phrase, as 
where he makes " Socrates bleed." 

But it is in his Moral Essays and parts of his Satires 
that Pope deserves the praise which he himself de 
sired : — 



422 POPE. 

" Happily to steer 
From grave to gay, from lively to severe, 
Correct with spirit, eloquent with ease, 
Intent to reason, or polite to please." 

Here Pope must be allowed to have established a style 
of his own, in which he is without a rival. One can 
open upon wit and epigram at any page. 

" Behold, if Fortune or a mistress frowns, 
Some plunge in business, other shave their crowns; 
To ease the soul of one oppressive weight, 
This quits an empire, that embroils a state; 
The same adust complexion has impelled, 
Charles to the convent, Philip to the field." 

Indeed, I think one gets a little tired of the invariable 
this set off by the inevitable that, and wishes antithesis 
would let him have a little quiet now and then. In the 
first couplet, too, the conditional " frown " would have 
been more elegant. But taken as detached passages, 
how admirably the different characters are drawn, so 
admirably that half the verses have become proverbial. 
This of Addison will bear reading again : — 

** Peace to all such : but were there one whose fires 
True genius kindles and fair fame inspires; 
Blest with each talent and each art to please, 
And born to write, converse, and live with ease; 
Should such a man, too fond to rule alone, 
Bear like the Turk no brother near the throne, 
View him with scornful yet with jealous eyes, 
And hate for arts that caused himself to rise, 
Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer, 
And, without sneering, teach the rest to sneer; 
Willing to wound and yet afraid to strike, 
Just hint a fault and hesitate dislike, 
Alike reserved to blame or to commend, 
A timorous foe and a suspicious friend; 
Dreading e'en fools, by flatterers besieged, 
And so obliging that he ne'er obliged; 
Like Cato give his little Senate laws, 
And sit attentive to his own applause, 
While wits and templars every sentence raise, 
And wonder with a foolish face of praise; — 



pope. 423 

Who but must laugh if such a man there be ? 
Who would not weep if Atticns were he?" 

With the exception of the somewhat technical image 
in the second verse of Fame blowing the fire of genius, 
which too much puts us in mind of the frontispieces of 
the day, surely nothing better of its kind was ever writ- 
ten. How applicable it was to Addison I shall consider 
in another place. As an accurate intellectual observer 
and describer of personal weaknesses, Pope stands by 
himself in English verse. 

In his epistle on the characters of women, no one w T ho 
has ever known a noble woman, na} r , I should almost 
say no one who ever had a mother or sister, will find 
much to please him. The climax of his praise rather 
degrades than elevates. 



-o' 



" 0, blest in temper, whose unclouded ray 
Can make to-morrow cheerful as to-day, 
She who can love a sister's charms, or hear 
Sighs for a daughter with unwounded ear, 
She who ne'er answers till a husband cools, 
Or, if she rules him, never shows she rules, 
Charms by accepting, by submitting sways, 
Yet has her humor most when she obeys ; 
Lets fops or fortune fly which way they will, 
Disdains all loss of tickets or coddle, 
Spleen, vapors, or smallpox, above them all 
And mistress of herself, though china fall." 

The last line is very witty and pointed, — but consider 
what an ideal of womanly nobleness he must have had, 
who praises his heroine for not being jealous of her 
daughter. Addison, in commending Pope's " Essay on 
Criticism," says, speaking of us " who live in the latter 
ages of the world " : "We have little else to do left us 
but to represent the common sense of mankind, in more 
strong, more beautiful, or more uncommon lights." I 
think he has here touched exactly the point of Pope's 
merit, and, in doing so, tacitly excludes him from the 



424: POPE. 

position of poet, in the highest sense. Take two of 
Jeremy Taylors prose sentences about the Countess of 
Carbery, the lady in Milton's "Comus": "The religion 
of this excellent lady was of another constitution : it 
took root downward in humility, and brought forth fruit 
upward in the substantial graces of a Christian, in 
charity and justice, in chastity and modesty, in fair 
friendships and sweetness of society. . . . And though 
she had the greatest judgment, and the greatest experi- 
ence of things and persons I ever yet knew in a person 
of her youth and sex and circumstances, yet, as if she 
knew nothing of it, she had the meanest opinion of her- 
self, and like a fair taper, when she shined to all the 
room, yet round about her station she had cast a shadow 
and a cloud, and she shined to everybody but herself." 
This is poetry, though not in verse. The plays of the 
elder dramatists are not without examples of weak and 
vile women, but they are not without noble ones either. 
Take these verses of Chapman, for example : — 

" Let no man value at a little price 
A virtuous woman"? counsel: her winded spirit 
Is feathered oftentimes with noble words 
And, like her beauty, ravishing and pure; 
The weaker body, still the stionger soul. 
0, what a treasure is a virtuous wife, 
Discreet and loving. Not one gift on earth 
Makes a man's life so nighly bound to heaven. 
She gives him double forces to endure 
And to enjoy, being one with him, 
Feeling his joys and griefs with equal sense: 
If he fetch sighs, she draws her breath as short; 
If he lament, she melts herself in tears; 
If he be glad, she triumphs; if he stir, 
She moves his way. in all things his sweet ape, 
Himself divinely varied without change- 
All store without her leave > a man but poor, 
And with her poverty is exceeding store." 

Pope in the character I have read was drawing his ideal 
woman, for he says at the end that she shall be his 



pope. 425 

muse. The sentiments are those of a bourgeois and of 
the back parlor, more than of the poet and the muse's 
bower. A man's mind is known by the company it 
keeps. 

JNow it is very possible that the women of Pope's 
time were as bad as they could be ; but if God made 
poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of 
the pure, the holy, and the beautiful. I grant the in- 
fluence of the age, but there is a sense in which the 
poet is of no age, and Beauty, driven from every other 
home, will never be an outcast and a wanderer, while 
there is a poet's nature left, will never fail of the tribute 
at least of a song. It seems to me that Pope had a 
sense of the neat rather than of the beautiful. His 
nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in 
enjoying the charm. 

However great his merit in expression, I think it im- 
possible that a true poet could have written such a 
satire as the Dunciad, which is even nastier than it is 
witty. It is filthy even in a filthy age, and Swift him- 
self could not have gone beyond some parts of it. One's 
mind needs to be sprinkled with some disinfecting fluid 
after reading it. I do not remember that any other 
poet ever made poverty a crime. And it is wholly with- 
out discrimination. De Foe is set in the pillory forever; 
and George Wither, the author of that charming poem, 
" Fair Virtue," classed among the dunces. And was it 
not in this age that loose Dick Steele paid his wife the 
finest compliment ever paid to woman, when he said 
"that to love her was a liberal education'"? 

Even in the " Rape of the Lock," the fancy is that of 
a wit rather than of a poet. It. might not be just to 
compare his Sylphs with the Fairies of Shakespeare ; 
but contrast the kind of fancy shown in the poem 
with that of Drayton's Nymphidia, for example. I will 



426 pope. 

give one stanza of it, describing the palace of the 

Fairy : — 

" The walls of Spider's legs were made, 
Well mortised, and finely laid; 
( He was the master of his trade 
It curiously that builded:) 
The windows of the eyes of cats, 
And, for the roof, instead of slats 
'T is covered with the skins of bats, 
With moonshine that are gilded.'' 

In the last line the eye and fancy of a poet are recog- 
nized. 

Personally we know more about Tope than about any 
of our poets- He kept no secrets about himself. If he 
did not let the cat out of the bag, he always contrived 
to give her tail a wrench so that we might know she 
was there. In spite of the savageness of his satires, his 
natural disposition seems to have been an amiable one, 
and his character as an author was as purely factitious 
as his style. Dr. Johnson appears to have suspected his 
sincerity ; but artifice more than insincerity lay at the 
basis of his character. I think that there was very 
little real malice in him, and that his " evil was wrought 
from want of thought." When Dennis was old and 
poor, he wrote a prologue for a play to be acted for his 
benefit. Except Addison, he numbered among his friends 
the most illustrious men of his time. 

The correspondence of Pope is, on the whole, less in- 
teresting than that of any other eminent English poet, 
except that of Southey, and their letters have the same 
fault of being labored compositions. Southey's are, on 
the whole, the more agreeable of the two, for they 
inspire one (as Pope's certainly do not) with a sincere 
respect for the character of the writer. Pope's are 
altogether too full of the proclamation of his own 
virtues to be pleasant reading. It is j)lain that they 



pope. 427 

were mostly addressed to the public, perhaps even to 
r~~ L - *y. But letters, however carefully drilled to be 
pect, are sure to blab, and those of Pope leave 
•eader's mind an unpleasant feeling of circum- 
, — of an attempt to look as an eminent literary 
_t should rather than as the man really was. 
They have the unnatural constraint of a man in full 
dress sitting for his portrait and endeavoring to look his 
best. We never catch him, if he can help it, at un- 
awares. Among all Pope's correspondents, Swift shows 
in the most dignified and, one is tempted to say, the 
most amiable light. It is creditable to the Dean that 
the letters which Pope addressed to him are by far the 
most simple and straightforward of any that he wrote. 
No sham could encounter those terrible eyes in Dublin 
without wincing. I think, on the whole, that a revision 
of judgment would substitute " discomforting conscious- 
ness of the public " for " insincerity " in judging Pope's 
character by his letters. He could not shake off the 
habits of the author, and never, or almost never, in 
prose, acquired that knack of seeming carelessness that 
makes Wal pole's elaborate compositions such agreeable 
reading. Pope would seem to have kept a common- 
place-book of phrases proper to this or that occasion ; 
and he transfers a compliment, a fine moral sentiment, 
nay, even sometimes a burst of passionate ardor, from 
one correspondent to another, with the most cold-blooded 
impartiality. Were it not for this curious economy of 
his, no one could read his letters to Lady Wortley Mon- 
tague without a conviction that they were written by a 
lover. Indeed, I think nothing short of the spretce in- 
juria forma? will account for (though it will not excuse) 
the savage vindictiveness he felt and showed towards 
her. It may be suspected also that the bitterness of 
caste added gall to his resentment. His enemy wore 



428 pope. 

that impenetrable armor of superior rank which ren- 
dered her indifference to his shafts the more provoking 
that it was unaffected. Even for us his satire loses its 
sting when we reflect that it is not in human nature for a 
woman to have had two such utterly irreconcilable charac- 
ters as those of Lady Mary before and after her quarrel 
with the poet. In any view of Pope's conduct in this 
affair, there is an ill savor in his attempting to degrade 
a woman whom he had once made sacred with his love. 
Spenser touches the right chord when he says of the 
Rosalind who had rejected him, 

" Not, then, to her, that .scorned thing so base, 
But to myself the blame, that lookt so high; 
Yet so much grace let her vouchsafe to grant 
To simple swain, sitli her I may not love, 
Yet that I may her honor paravant 
And praise her worth, though far my wit above; 
Such grace shall be some guerdon of the grief 
And long affliction which I have endured." 

In his correspondence with Aaron Hill, Pope, pushed 
to the wall, appears positively mean. He vainly en- 
deavors to show that his personalities had all been writ- 
ten in the interests of literature and morality, and from 
no selfish motive. But it is hard to believe that Theo- 
bald would have been deemed worthy of his disgustful 
pre-eminence but for the manifest superiority of his 
edition of Shakespeare, or that Addison would have 
been so adroitly disfigured unless through wounded self- 
love. It is easy to conceive the resentful shame which 
Pope must have felt when Addison so almost contempt- 
uously disavowed all complicity in his volunteer defence 
of Cato in a brutal assault on Dennis. Pope had done 
a mean thing to propitiate a man whose critical judg- 
ment he dreaded ; and the great man, instead of thank- 
ing him, had resented his interference as impertinent. 
In the whole portrait of Atticus one cannot help feeling 



POPE. 429 

that Pope's satire is not founded on knowledge, but 
rather nn what his own sensitive suspicion divined of 
us of one whose expressed preferences in po- 
ed a condemnation of the very grounds of the 
wn popularity. We shall not so easily give 
irest and most dignified figure of that some- 
what vulgar generation, who ranks with Sidney and 
Spenser, as one of the few perfect gentlemen in our lit- 
erary annals. A man who could command the unswerv- 
ing loyalty of honest and impulsive Dick Steele could 
not have been a coward or a backbiter. The only justi- 
fication alleged by Pope was of the flimsiest kind, namely, 
that Addison regretted the introduction of the sylphs in 
the second edition of the " Rape of the Lock," saying that 
the poem was merum sal before. Let any one ask him- 
self how he likes an author's emendations of any poem 
to which his ear had adapted itself in its former shape, 
and he will hardly think it needful to charge Addison 
with any mean motive for his conservatism in this mat- 
ter. One or two of Pope's letters are so good as to 
make us regret that he did not oftener don the dressing- 
gown and slippers in his correspondence. One in par- 
ticular, to Lord Burlington, describing a journey on 
horseback to Oxford with Lintot the bookseller, is full 
of a lightsome humor worthy of Cowper, almost worthy 
of Gray. 

Joseph Warton, in summing up at the end of his 
essay on the genius and writings of Pope, says that the 
largest part of his works " is of the didactic, moral, and 
satiric ; and, consequently, not of the most poetic species 
of poetry ; whence it is manifest that good sense and 
judgment were his characteristical excellences rather than 
fancy and invention." It is plain that in any strict 
definition there can be only one kind of poetry, and 
that what Warton really meant to say was that Pope 



430 pope. 

was not a poet at all. This, I think, is shown by what 
Johnson says in his " Life of Pope," though he does not 
name Wart on. The dispute on this point went on with 
occasional lulls for more than a half-century after War- 
ton's death. It was renewed with peculiar acrimony 
when the Rev. W. L. Bowles diffused and confused War- 
tou's critical opinions in his own peculiarly helpless way 
in editing a new edition of Pope in 180G. Bowles en- 
tirely mistook the functions of an editor, and maladroitly 
entangled his judgment of the poetry with his estimate 
of the author's character.* Thirteen years later, Camp- 
bell, in his "Specimens," controverted Mr. Bowles's esti- 
mate of Pope's character and position, both as man and 
poet. Mr. Bowles replied in a letter to Campbell on 
what he called " the invariable principles of poetry." 
This letter was in turn somewhat sharply criticised by 
Gilchrist in the Quarterly Review. Mr. Bowdes made an 
angry and unmannerly retort, among other things charg- 
ing Gilchrist with the crime of being a tradesman's son, 
whereupon the affair became what they call on the 
frontier a free fight, in which Gilchrist, Roscoe, the elder 
Disraeli, and Byron took part with equal relish, though 
with various fortune. The last shot, in what had grown 
into a thirty years' w T ar, betw r een the partisans of what 
was called the Old School of poetry and those of the 
New, was fired by Bowles in 1826. Bowles, in losing 
his temper, lost also what little logic he had, and though, 
in a vague way, assthetically right, contrived always to 
be argumentatively wrong. Anger made worse confu- 
sion in a brain never very clear, and he had neither the 

* Bowles's Sonnets, wellnigh forgotten now, did more than his con- 
troversial writings for the cause he advocated. Their influence upon 
the coming generation was great (greater than we can well account 
for) and beneficial. Coleridge tells us that he made forty copies of 
them while at Christ's Hospital. Wordsworth's prefaces first made 
imagination the true test of poetry, in its more modern sense. But 
thev drew little notice till later. 



pope. 431 

fiphnlovghip n0 r the critical faculty for a vigorous expo- 
f his own thesis. J^lever was wilder hitting than 
he laid himself open to dreadful punishment, espe- 
•om Byron, whose two letters are masterpieces of 
prose. Bowles most happily exemplified in his 
own pamphlets what was really the turning-point of the 
w T hole controversy (though all the combatants more or 
less lost sight of it or never saw it), namely, that with- 
out clearness and terseness there could be no good writ- 
ing, wmether in prose or verse ; in other words that, 
while precision of phrase presupposes lucidity of thought, 
yet good writing is an art as well as a gift. Byron alone 
saw clearly that here was the true knot of the question, 
though, as his object w r as mainly mischief, he w r as not 
careful to loosen it. The sincerity of Byron's admira- 
tion of Pope has been, it seems to me, too hastily 
doubted. What he admired in him was that patience 
in careful finish which he felt to be wanting in himself 
and in most of his contemporaries. Pope's assailants 
went so far as to make a defect of what, rightly consid- 
ered, was a distinguished merit, though the amount of 
it was exaggerated. The weak point in the case was 
that his nicety concerned itself wholly about the phrase, 
leaving the thought to be as faulty as it would, and that 
it seldom extended beyond the couplet, often rot. beyond 
a single verse. His serious poetry, therefore, at its best, 
is a succession of loosely strung epigrams, and no poet 
more often than he makes the second line of the couplet 
a mere trainbearer to the first. His more ambitious works 
may be defined as careless thinking carefully versified. 
Lessing was one of the first to see this, and accordingly 
he tells us that " his great, I will not say greatest, merit 
lay in what we call the mechanic of poetry." * Lessing, 

* Briefe die neneste Litteratnr betreffend, 1759, II. Brief. See also 
his more elaborate criticism of the " Essay on Man" (Pope ein Meta- 
physiker), 1755. 



432 pope. 

with his usual insight, parenthetically qualifies his state- 
ment ; for where Pope, as in the " Rape of the Lock," 
found a subject exactly level with his genius, he was 
able to make what, taken for all in all, is the most per- 
fect poem in the language. 

It will hardly be questioned that the man who writes 
what is still piquant and rememberable, a century and 
a quarter after his death, was a man of genius. But 
there are two modes of uttering such things as cleave to 
the memory of mankind. They may be said or sung. 
I do not think that Pope's verse anywhere sings, but it 
should seem that the abiding presence of fancy in his 
best work forbids his exclusion from the rank of poet. 
The atmosphere in which he habitually dwelt was an 
essentially prosaic one, the language habitual to him 
was that of conversation and society, so that he lacked 
the help of that fresher dialect which seems like inspira- 
tion in the elder poets. His range of associations was 
of that narrow kind which is always vulgar, whether 
it be found in the village or the court. Certainly he 
has not the force and majesty of Dryden in his better 
moods, but he has a grace, a finesse, an art of being 
pungent, a sensitiveness to impressions, that would in- 
cline us to rank him with Voltaire (whom in many ways 
he so much resembles), as an author with whom the 
gift of writing was primary, and that of verse secondary. 
No other poet that I remember ever wrote prose which 
is so purely prose as his ; and yet, in any impartial crit- 
icism, the " Rape of the Lock " sets him even as a poet 
far above many men more largely endowed with poetic 
feeling and insight than he. 

A great deal must be allowed to Pope for the age in 
which he lived, and not a little, I think, for the influence 
of Swift. In his own province he still stands unapproach- 
ably alone. If to be the greatest satirist of individual 



pope. 433 

men, rather than of human nature, if to be the highest 
h the life of the court and the ball-room 
in verse, if to have added more phrases 
s than any other but Shakespeare, if to 
Dur generations make a man a great poet, 
— then he is one. He was the chief founder of an arti- 
ficial style of writing, which in his' hands was living and 
powerful, because he used it to express artificial modes 
of thinking and an artificial state of society. Measured 
by any high standard of imagination, he will be found 
wanting ; tried by any test of wit, he is unrivalled. 



THE END. 






Cambridge : Printed by Welch, Bigelow, and Company. 






V 



